The Year of Mobile Health

2016 was the year of various paradigms to be broken and, also, the year of foreseen-trends to become true and tangible.

The rise of mobile is here to stay and it is certainly building up a revolution to providing access to information, acceleration of commerce and a whole new level of user experiences; some of them led by the mutation of its conventional use – moving up from hands to eyes along with the dawn of virtual and augmented realities, and as well coupled with certain wearables that talk a very similar language.

For Apontador, different to Google where health related searches account for around 5% of total searches, this category represents the highest rank when it comes to what the 130 millions of Brazilians look for when they come to us every year

Only in 2016, Apontador made more than 6 million connections between customers and health related locations (Doctors, hospitals, clinics, dentists, pharmacies) and half of them were conducted from mobile devices looking for phone numbers and directions.

These machines have already become a sort of a symbiotic element in our lives which, in average, we use 150 times per day among checking, reading, watching and typing anything with them.

More specifically and applied to the Health category, mobile and wearables already allow for certain body checks, like heartbeats, sleeping biorhythms; and even help our fitness calendar to keep fit in our busy lives. In addition, if something happens to you or your kids, a picture can be taken and sent via whatsapp to your doctor for initial diagnostic prior to a local visit to his office.

“The patient that comes to hospitals to see doctors today, already knows about his/her condition; they have gathered proactively information in the internet that makes for a conversation rather than a pure doctor-patient’s appointment; and they know about the doctors themselves, who they are, what they have done and what they are excellent at”, said Antonio Luiz Frasson from Israeli Hospital, Albert Einstein.

As we have already stated previously, the mobile device is clearly becoming, or better said, has already become the remote control of our lives, and digging deeper, it will allow for speeding up processes like booking doctor’s appointment via companies like BoaConsulta, DrConsulta along with many others today in Brazil; receive check-up results and medicine to be purchased and delivered much faster.

But also, think again, going to the hospital or a clinic can be started from your mobile phone by hailing a cab or UBER from your current location to take you to the nearest hospital or health related institution; when getting to the hospital your healthcare card can also be stored in your phone and even your health record, in doing so and by living in that way, what it once was a single channel, today we are getting closer and closer to live it as THE channel.

In conclusion, we can say that the Mobile channel has become the accelerator to healthier lives, more intelligent health decisions and more beneficial times with your families.

(Text in Portuguese and photo published at Proxxima)

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