With the objective of promoting the use of mobile devices to improve healthcare and patient wellbeing and optimize care processes, the Ibero-American Mobile Technologies in Healthcare network (RITMOS) will lead an eHealth research group at the Healthcare Sciences Study Group of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) for the next four years.
The initiative, which has the support of the WHO regional office in the Americas, will develop projects that incorporate and standardize mHealth. In addition, it will make it possible to analyze macro-data generated by mobile health to prevent diseases and export know-how.
This international network will extend and strengthen the cooperation in telemedicine that several members of RITMOS have already been working on but we will now have financing for four years with the partnership of two strategic institutional and technological partners: the Fundación Mobile World Capital Barcelona (MWCB) and Telefónica, and the active participation of the eHealth Program of the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), said Francesc Saigí, the head of the project and director of the masters course in Telemedicine at the UOC.
RITMOS will be financed by the Ibero-American Program for Development Sciences and Technologies (CYTED) and receive 80,000 euros. The network includes 13 work groups and 58 researchers in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Spain.
The initiative will develop strategies that make it possible to implement effective integration of mobile technologies with healthcare services (mHealth) in Latin America to facilitate access to healthcare systems, improve lifestyles, focus on the prevention of the disease and enable self-management by patients with chronic diseases, Saigi explained.
In addition, the director of the project noted that the strength of RITMOS arises from the complementary skills of its different members: Latin American universities and research centers will help us to detect the needs we must address; MWCB and Telefónica will contribute knowledge about the development of applications and mobile technologies that allow for the sharing of health data, while the UOC, in close collaboration with PAHO, will provide knowledge and the political instruments necessary to translate the potential of mobile health into actual experiences involving the healthcare services of Latin America.
With mHealth, patients switch from a passive role to a more participative one
Francesc Saigí explained that mHealth solutions can contribute to the efficiency of care services thanks to real time communication with patients and the exchange of app user data.
The analysis of big data generated by mobile health can also help us to improve prevention of diseases as it provides us with a more precise and comprehensive image of diseases and patient behavior, he said.
The director of RITMOS also explained that mHealth solutions help to change the role of the patient from passive to being more participative as well as increasing their sense of responsibility for their health.
Source: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
