Promoting Health Education through Mobile Apps: A Quantitative Analysis of American Hospitals

Abstract

Using mobile apps as a corporate communication tool helps hospitals to improve their health education initiatives. This paper aims to analyze how these organizations can use mobile apps to implement health education initiatives addressed to patients. To achieve this, we conducted a literature review (health education, mobile apps, role of doctors and patients), and we resorted to using 38 quantitative indicators to evaluate how the 100 best hospitals in the United States manage mobile apps for implementing health education initiatives addressed to patients. Our results prove that 95% of hospitals displayed general mobile apps for patients, but just some of these organizations proposed mobile apps for patients suffering from non-communicable diseases, including: heart diseases (9.47%), cancer (7.37%), chronic respiratory diseases (3.26%), and diabetes (3.16%). We concluded that hospitals should create a department specializing in designing mobile apps that are adapted to patients’ medical and social needs, and that are also consistent with public health priorities.