Overview
M-health (mobile health) is one of the components of eHealth. The Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) defined M-health as medical and public health practice supported by mobile devices, such as mobile phones, patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other wireless devices.
In M-health, mobile phones and their various utilities are utilised and capitalised upon. The various utilities of a mobile phone are voice calls, short messaging service (SMS), mobile applications (apps), Internet, global positioning system (GPS), Bluetooth technology etc.
Mobile health technologies are a proven medium of doctor–patient communication and have contributed to significant improvement in the patients’ health outcomes. Doctor consultation through mobile health apps is convenient for the doctors and their patients as it saves time and money of both.
This approach has been found to overcome widespread health system barriers, such as health professional shortages, reliance on untrained and/or informal providers, cost of service, transportation, and lack of sources of reliable information.
The dominant mode of healthcare financing is out of pocket expenditure, and the majority of healthcare is delivered by the private sector . Thus, mHealth, as a proven medium of healthcare delivery, has enormous potential in the country. With urbanisation, the demand for mHealth-related services in the country is likely to increase too.
To our knowledge, there has been very little published work in the domain of M-health applications currently functioning in the country with the provision of doctor consultation online/offline. With this background, the current research is being formulated to overview the M-health apps operating in India with the facility of either online doctor consultation or offline doctor appointment booking.
