Personalized Telehealth in the Future: A Global Research Agenda

Abstract

As telehealth plays an even greater role in global health care delivery, it will be increasingly important to develop a strong evidence base of successful, innovative telehealth solutions that can lead to scalable and sustainable telehealth programs. This paper has two aims: (1) to describe the challenges of promoting telehealth implementation to advance adoption and (2) to present a global research agenda for personalized telehealth within chronic disease management. Using evidence from the United States and the European Union, this paper provides a global overview of the current state of telehealth services and benefits, presents fundamental principles that must be addressed to advance the status quo, and provides a framework for current and future research initiatives within telehealth for personalized care, treatment, and prevention. A broad, multinational research agenda can provide a uniform framework for identifying and rapidly replicating best practices, while concurrently fostering global collaboration in the development and rigorous testing of new and emerging telehealth technologies. In this paper, the members of the Transatlantic Telehealth Research Network offer a 12-point research agenda for future telehealth applications within chronic disease management.

An Improved Model for GUI Design of mHealth Context-Aware Applications

“…Finally, the main benefit for management staff is the increase of efficiency, accuracy and procedural tracking in their tasks. mHealth allows patients' empowerment as it increases self-awareness [1,7,8] and self-monitoring [9], which leads to the improvement of patients' decisionmaking and self-management [10,11]. An example of this is the delivery of support and guidance to patients through mobile devices [12].…”

“…The fact that doctors use their personal mobile phones for work issues [16] allows them to perform their activities flexibly by working remotely [17] and to consult with specialists allocated in different places around the world [9]. mHealth also enhances the learning process of health workforce because mobile devices have the appropriate technology to offer services that are used to train and increase knowledge of the health workforce [7,18]. Some examples are the use of TB Detext [19] -a mobile application providing health workers with acces to up-to-date educational content about tuberculosis-, and the use of PDAs to provide nurses with access to tools and health information [5].…”

“…Despite of these benefits, mobile devices still have several challenges to face in order to keep improving health processes [1,3,6,7]. One of the main issues that stops mobile technology from delivering more benefits is the small screen size of mobile devices [5,23].…”

“…The evaluation of GUI mHealth applications is less rigorous than the evaluation of web-based health applications [27]. Moreover, healthcare experts and target users are not included in the development process of these applications [7,8]. To counter this challenge, it is important to develop frameworks enhancing the design and evaluation processes of mHealth applications [18,27].…”

Analytics and Telehealth Emerging Technologies: The Path Forward for Smart Primary Care Environment

“…While global spending on health is expected to increase to $18.28 trillion in 2040 [1], the future of primary care is positioned to use advancements in telehealth technologies and big data analytics to deliver preventive medicine and personalized healthcare under valuebased care models [2]. Telehealth allows remote monitoring of patients and managing of their disease progression with continuous assessment; while big data analytics processes data collected from telehealth modality including both objective data (e.g.…”