**2. Chronic disease management: necessity of mHealth approach**

In most countries, chronic diseases lead to high health care costs and reduced productivity of people in society [18]. Diabetes is a common chronic disease in nearly all countries [19] and one of the most common metabolic diseases with an increasing incidence. More than 15% of national health budget is dedicated to diabetic care [20]. Diabetes as a hidden disease causes many complications such as various types of heart disease, nephropathy, retinopathy, and so on, thus imposing direct and indirect high costs to society. In Iran, diabetes complications contributed to 53% of the aggregate excess direct costs of diabetes [21].

The quality of diabetic care improves, on one hand, if patient monitoring is done accord‐ ing to the nutrition program and physician orders that are placed with high quality [22]. On the other hand, fast and accurate diagnosis due to continuous monitoring through informa‐ tion communication technology (ICT) devices leads to prevent the death of diabetic pa‐ tients [23]. Telemedicine as a main tool to remote health care delivery and home care has advantages such as real-time access to health information [3, 24], reducing medical errors [25], and increasing coordination and cooperation among health care teams [1], reducing travel of patients and their families in remote area [26], and useful education tool for patients, their families, and health care providers [27]. Therefore, this technology has a very impor‐ tant role in decreasing costs and taking appropriate management actions especially in diabetes management and other chronic disease [28, 29]. The use of innovative technolo‐ gies such as mobiles to enjoy the most advantages of telemedicine is necessary. Mobile health systems can be a good option for health care industry because of reducing delay and error in patient treatment, avoiding test duplication, providing remote and timely access of health care professionals to organizational database and patient information especially in the emergency situations [26, 30].
