App developers aim to help prevent readmissions

A growing number of medical smartphone apps aimed at reducing the number of patient readmissions have hit the market to help hospitals avoid financial penalties.

Under the Affordable Care Act, healthcare providers can be penalized for high patient readmission rates. This has motivated many providers to test new technologies to reduce readmissions. Many of these apps simply provide patients with appointment reminders, medication instructions, and discharge instructions. Others actively collect patient data and can send alerts to physicians if any red flags are triggered.

However, developers do face some unique hurdles creating apps for the healthcare market, such as ensuring their technology is compatible with any one of the more than 150 electronic heath records systems used by U.S. hospitals.

 

App developers will likely also face challenges from traditional healthcare companies and EHR vendors when they eventually begin offering their own mobile app add-ons to existing products already used in hospitals.