Mobile Healthcare: Opportunities and Challenges

The healthcare crisis in the US has caught national attention because of its high percentage of GDP spending. Healthcare reform has become a heated topic of discussion. Its key lies in quality of care, the foundation of which is information. Mobile- healthcare has the potential to greatly improve the quality of healthcare. It encompasses the realm of healthcare activities empowered by the whole spectrum of computer, communication and information technologies. The challenges of the current healthcare landscape and potential solutions offered by m-healthcare are presented in four distinct yet related domains: service, technology, finance and organization. This paper addresses healthcare as a whole, with special remarks directed exclusively to the radiology subspecialty due to its unique requirements of large bandwidth for transferring image data and exacting screen size for image display.