‘Little Evidence' Of Digital Medicine's Impact On The Bottom Line

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

According to a six-month trial, mobile technology has no greater impact on healthcare costs than traditional disease management.

A six month trial of 160 participants by Scripps Translational Science Institute has found no discernable difference in healthcare costs when it comes to mobile healthcare technology versus traditional disease management.

According to Fierce Mobile Healthcare, the study included patients managing hypertension, diabetes and/or cardiac arrhythmia with iPhone-enabled biosensors, blood pressure monitors, blood glucose meters or a mobile ECG device. Both data aggregation and visualization tools were used to track data and caregivers were able to access information on an online dashboard.

“Overall we found little in terms of differences in health insurance claims between individuals enrolled in the control and monitoring arm,” Scripps researchers wrote. “This suggests that while there may be small, short-term increases in healthcare utilization as a result of mobile health monitoring, there is likely not a major effect.

“There was little evidence of differences in health care costs or utilization as a result of the intervention. Furthermore, we found evidence that the control and intervention groups were equivalent with respect to most health care utilization outcomes. This result suggests there are not large short-term increases or decreases in health care costs or utilization associated with monitoring chronic health conditions using mobile health or digital medicine technologies.”

However Chilmark Research analyst Naveen Rao says these results came from a flawed study. Rao says limitation of claims data, the patient workflow process and poor data visualization led to misleading study results. “For this research, the failure to get this small, simple piece right may have been the study’s biggest flaw,” Rao said.