Using the Rapid Prototyping Model to Advance Mhealth: A Case Study From UCSF

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis:  mHealth exploits the unique nature of mobile technology to facilitate and enhance medical research, patient care and radically increase access to care. However, barriers to entry exist for clinicians and researchers, including development costs, lack of technical knowledge, and insufficient resources to innovate and collaborate with technologists. At UCSF a novel strategy based on the rapid prototyping model is being applied to developing mobile health solutions. This provides for brisk, iterative innovation and produces pilot data for research and proposal submissions.

Methods:  Interest in real-time patient engagement, guidance, and adaptive therapy led a UCSF School of Medicine team to develop, refine and implement a software framework for building and delivering personalized evidence-based care plans on any mobile device.

Results:  The platform, called emPATH, is currently being used to run over 30 projects across the spectrum of clinical care, including clinical trials, large-scale studies, data-collection, disease surveillance and management, and patient care. emPATH implements care pathways, a standard model for the delivery of health care, which makes integrating mobile much easier for clinicians, researchers and providers. It highly scalable, adaptable, simply to implement and tested. It can import, collect, organize and make sense of multiple data streams and fulfill provider-generated care plans. emPATH can communicate with and integrate information from any on-board or Bluetooth-enabled external sensors as well as import and export data to an EHR.

Conclusions:  Without the integration of evidence-based medicine, a mobile application or device is just another healthcare silo. Building a framework around care pathways, a model clinicians, researchers and providers are unmistakably adapted to, demystifies the concept of mobile applications, clarifies the process and immediately establishes a common understanding between the medical world and developers. The ability to iterate that is built into emPATH establishes a streamlined process for constructing  customized mobile applications grounded in evidence-based practice that can be delivered within days.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Low or no-cost prototyping and rapid deployment by the mHealth Team is a key factor in increasing the number, scope and success of mHealth projects at UCSF.