Mobile Health: New Cell Phone-Based Technologies Transform Emergency Care
Mobile phone technology is rapidly changing how healthcare is delivered, even as health wonks sit around wondering how we're going to pay for it. While "mobile health," as it's known, won't bring down costs, it's already starting to make it easier for people to get care in emergencies.
Perhaps the most astonishing development in mHealth is a new application that allows physicians to turn their iPhones into stethoscopes. More than 3 million doctors have already downloaded the low-cost app, which was invented by Peter Bentley, a researcher at University College London. Considering that the majority of U.S. doctors already use smartphones for personal and business purposes, this is an app that, as they say in Hollywood, "has legs."
Highmark, a Pittsburgh-based Blues plan, is pioneering another use of iPhones that could transform emergency care. Partnering with health content vendor A.D.A.M., Highmark is offering its members online provider and healthcare service information. Users can search for doctors and hospitals within a certain radius of their location by using the iPhone's built-in GPS. Maps and directions to provider sites are also available. In addition, the custom application, based on A.D.A.M.'s Medzio program, offers a "symptom navigator" and other educational resources.
But you don't need an iPhone to capitalize on the mHealth revolution. According to a story in the Washington Post, a growing number of consumers are using their cell phone cameras to snap and send photos of their injuries to emergency rooms or doctors. They might do so on the way to the ER, or if they're unsure whether they need immediate medical attention. This technology could be especially helpful to people in remote areas (although they'd need the ability to access cellular communications).
Neal Sikka, an emergency physician at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC, has been making cell phone diagnoses for friends and family for the past decade. Recently, he did a study of the accuracy of doctors' diagnoses based on mobile phone pictures in the GWU ER. His conclusion: 90 percent of the diagnoses are accurate.
Another trend in mHealth takes advantage of the fact that teenagers constantly text. A pilot study at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, OH, found that adolescent patients with diabetes who received text messages related to their medication plan were more likely to comply with it than those who didn't. Meanwhile, the Pediatric Heart Transplant Program at New York-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital is launching a one-year program that will use a text messaging platform to increase medication adherence in its teenage heart transplant patients.
What all of this adds up to is a sea change in medicine. People who are on the go -- that is to say, the majority of us -- can now be connected more or less constantly to their healthcare providers. And in emergency situations, an iStethoscope or a cell phone diagnostic photo can save lives.
Of course, there are some downsides. For example, some physicians report feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of messages they're receiving on their iPhones. And in a survey showing the prevalence of iPhone usage among doctors, 80 percent of the smartphone users said they had trouble using the technology to communicate with colleagues.
Still, these new uses of information technology are something that should be applauded. Even if technology can't haul us out of our financial hole, it might help make us healthier and safer.
Image supplied courtesy of Flickr.
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