The United States Army is using a mobile application and SMS to make sure that soldiers returning home from duty get the healthcare services they need.

As soldiers return home with significant injuries, the U.S. Military is providing a pilot mobile health outreach program to help speed recovery and track progress through AllOne Mobile, a mobile application that manages personal health information and is secured by Diversinet Corp.

"The Army was looking for better ways to stay in touch with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who were injured and make sure that they took very good care of those folks," said Stuart Segal, senior vice president for integrated health services for AllOne Health Corp., Wilkes-Barre, PA.

"What better way to stay in better touch, given the way people use cell phones, than through some kind of mobile phone application?" he said. "AllOne Mobile is a cell-phone-based app that gets loaded into each individual's phone as a vehicle for people to have most their important medical information secure and readily at hand anytime they need it."

Soldiers can use the mobile app to take their healthcare information and push it securely to a physician, treatment provider or family member to enable timely treatment to be rendered.

Mobile messaging provider Clickatell is partnering with AllOne Health to provide real time SMS communications for soldiers in the U.S. Military in need of care and services from their healthcare provider.

AllOne Health has more than 1,000 customers throughout the U.S. and in 44 countries. These include Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania and Significa Insurance Group.

Reaching 775 networks in more than 200 countries, Clickatell serves 8,300 customers including First National Bank, Moneybookers, Metropolitan Life, Visa, S1 Corporation and other financial service providers.

Working with Clickatell to offer text messages for important alerts and notifications, AllOne Mobile provides injured Soldiers access to case managers and other military personnel to monitor and stay in touch with service members through personalized mobile communications.

Information received from soldiers will help personalize and monitor daily care.

Initially, AllOne Mobile's platform is anticipated to support the rehabilitation needs of up to 10,000 returning Soldiers in a phased implementation over the next year.

The new service from AllOne Health has been built to provide the fastest, most reliable and secure mobile health care information available today.

Clickatell is used to send provisional SMS messages to "touch and remind" soldiers to access the latest encrypted information within their secure health information application.

AllOne Mobile's proprietary health information application, secured by Diversinet Corp., links participating service members recuperating at home with their case managers and unit support staff.

Taking advantage of mobile technology within the health sector gives healthcare providers and patients the ability to personalize care, deploy services remotely and promote healthier lifestyles.

"We've pushed pharmacy claims up to people's phones, with an accurate record of each of the prescriptions they've filled, which is very important information for a treating physician to know, or if you wind up in an emergency room, this can help avoid medical errors," Mr. Segal said.

"Army case managers intend to use this platform to be able to push specific messaging around their particular issue very securely to a person's phone within the app," he said. "They can remind someone they have an appointment coming up or if they have to go to the DA or have to contact the staff sergeant, or to say ?I'm your case manager, give me a call.'"

This is an encrypted app that each soldier has a PIN for, so if they lose their phone no one can get in to it.

Communications on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis can make a big difference in caring for patients through at home mobile care programs, which also provides significant cost savings to the healthcare industry, according to Clickatell.

With this service from AllOne Health, the U.S. Military is trying to improve communications and enhance the quality of healthcare through up-to-the-minute access to medical information by patients and health care providers.

Almost four billion people depend on mobile phones every day, and SMS comes built in to almost every phone.

SMS is being used by communities, organizations and governments worldwide to save lives and connect people.

Healthcare, along with financial services, social networking, transportation and other industries, will benefit from SMS.

The Millennium Development Goals that specifically address health, as set forth by the United Nations Millennium Declaration, are exploring mHealth technologies to improve health outcomes, as well as generate cost savings within the health system.

The specific potential of mHealth lies in its ability to offer opportunities for information transfer capabilities that previous technologies did not.

As a result of such technological advances, the capacity for improved access to information and two-way communication becomes available at the point-of-need and for healthcare workers at the point-of-care.

A burgeoning technology to improve the healthcare system as we know it today, SMS has the potential to save health care institutions -- such as hospitals, insurance providers, clinics and other patient care facilities -- time and money by offering patients a way to communicate directly with healthcare professionals, getting to the heart of the health matter in real time, potentially avoiding valuable office visit time and other red-tape issues that cause slow-downs and high costs.

"Clickatell does work in the text message arena, although messages containing clinical content don't go out via text message, it's all within app so it's totally secure, but we can send a text message to the person's number saying ?by the way, go into the app to look at your private messages,'" Mr. Segal said.

"Clickatell is an aggregator of SMS gateways for all the different networks, which is less expensive and more efficient than going to each individual carrier," he said. "We are very happy that we could serve people who have put their lives on the line for all of us."