The promise of digital (mobile) health in cancer prevention and treatment

摘要

Technological advances in how we exchange and analyze information are having a broad impact across all facets of modern medicine. Indeed, the mobile health (mHealth) paradigm is providing the format for instantaneous exchange of information between health providers and their patients, creating a potential virtual forum consisting of the patient's medical team and expert opinion worldwide. This is particularly important in oncology where mHealth is promising to provide the platform upon which patients become more committed to cancer-preventa-tive lifestyles. There is now a framework for a revolutionary dynamic to emerge within the patient care model that will improve self-health advocacy and, ultimately, clinical outcomes. Currently, mHealth is an indispensable modality for providing access to care in remote parts of the world and it is already being used to shore up inefficiencies in clinical trial management. The growing capacity to store and analyze large amounts of data is making the mHealth arsenal a necessary addition in the genomic age of clinical medicine.