If according to the latest data provided by the industry research department of Counting Information, by 2017, the size of China's mobile medical market will reach 12.53 billion yuan in the form of incremental growth. In contrast to the current, China has more than 2,000 mobile medical APPs, which are used to provide services such as searching for doctors, booking appointments, purchasing medical products and checking professional information. In this regard, the mobile medical APP there is a trend of "blowout" development.
The proliferation of mobile medical APP is not only because it carries the advantages of Internet technology such as time saving, fast diagnosis, and low cost, but most importantly, it can ease the tension of the oversupply of medical resources and allow people in need to realize fast consultation. However, in the actual application of the three aspects of medical resources, APP developers and market regulation to improve the use of mobile medical APP.
Lack of professional medical resources
At present, the domestic healthcare mHealth mainly includes B2B model for hospital doctors and B2C model directly for users.
There are four main categories of medical mobile APP terminals: disease management, doctor-patient communication platforms, such as "Good Doctor Online"; online consulting, such as "Chunyu Palm Doctor", advertising revenue is the main source of income; drug management, such as "Ding Xiangyuan". The medication management, such as "Clove Garden" medication assistant, doctors can use to query drug manuals, view the summary and full text of the medication guide, use common medical calculation tools; through the medical literature to introduce new products to doctors, such as apricot tree forest "medical literature".
The core issue is that whether it's managing chronic diseases or providing telemedicine for customers, what patients ultimately need is access to professional medical services, which means the ultimate recipient of all data should be the doctor. However, doctors in China's public hospitals have not yet been fundamentally emancipated, and it is difficult for doctors (especially those in tertiary hospitals) to provide detailed and sufficient professional advice to their clients through these mobile medical devices and APPs.
Throughout China, most of these APPs are in the primary stage of user accumulation. Take the hot consumer medical concept devices on the market as an example, most of them focus on the monitoring and recording of certain simple data, such as blood pressure and blood glucose monitoring, monitoring of women's physiological cycles, and temperature testing for women of childbearing age and children, which is essentially a kind of light diagnosis, and can't fundamentally solve the healthcare Demand. Previously, some industry insiders also analyzed that "disease diagnosis requires medical history, symptoms, signs, auxiliary examinations, and finally diagnostic treatment. Through the Internet, doctors often only know the history of the symptoms, the other links can still only be realized in the hospital."
Because of the lack of specialized medical resources, mobile medical apps will also increase the incidence of misdiagnosis, mistreatment and delayed conditions.
Despite such problems, the analysts above also pointed out that in the diagnosis and treatment of chronic diseases such as hypertension, if supplemented with wearable devices or home appliances with high data accuracy, the mobile medical APP still has a promising future.
The developer's responsibility as an intermediary
What is the responsibility for medical malpractice when using an mHealth APP?
General users in the use of the process is very difficult to determine through the APP network on the other side of the "expert" qualifications and identity, if there is a medical or pharmaceutical accident problem, the causal relationship between the infringement of the results of the damage as well as the legal responsibility between the relevant subjects will become much more complex. In addition, there are also implanted advertisements and false medical or pharmaceutical advertisements on the app.
Lawyer Liu Ye of Shanghai Sea Law Firm believes that the legal position of the Internet enterprise providing APP software should be an intermediary, and since it provides intermediary or intermediate services and does not directly provide medical services, there is no legal problem with patients. However, the Internet enterprise may also form a medical service contract relationship with doctors and patients, at this time, the business is equivalent to share some of the hospital's obligations, then the Internet enterprise directly with the patient to form a medical service contract relationship, can consider whether it is consistent with the relevant provisions of the law of practicing physicians.
And for the whole mobile medical APP market, "the first is the market is too chaotic, various medical institutions and commercial organizations are engaged in remote consultation, but there is no standardized criteria. The second is the legal regulatory gap. Therefore, it is imperative to introduce targeted administrative regulations. In addition, data integration, protection and utilization of telemedicine are also urgent issues." Liu Xin, of the Research Center for Pharmaceutical Law and Ethics at China University of Political Science and Law, said.
Regulatory system to keep up
The current wide range of departments involved in the regulation of mobile medical APPs is bound to clarify responsibilities.
For example, drug mobile APP will definitely involve the application of drugs, then there will be the supervision of the Food and Drug Administration. And medical APP is again there are applications about health care and health, there will also be the supervision of the Bureau of Health Supervision. And the advertisements in the mobile medical app will again be supervised by the Administration for Industry and Commerce. For fraudulent medical consumption and the sale of counterfeit and shoddy medicines, it again involves the supervision of the public security department.
"Clarifying the duties of each department can ensure the rationality and orderliness of the duties, improve the efficiency of the supervision mechanism, and avoid overlapping and contradictory duties of the supervisory subjects." Deng Yong of the Law Department of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine said.
In this regard, Liu Xin, on the other hand, believes that the competent authorities should introduce industry standards as soon as possible, especially the determination of technical standards is very important. Secondly, a series of important legal issues, such as how government functions regulate telemedicine services, how to govern and deal with the services provided by physicians in the tele-service system, and whether the provision of telemedicine services by physicians belongs to medical practice, should be resolved as soon as possible.