When will we consult our phones before the doctor?

07 Jun When will we consult our phones before the doctor?

In the future will we go to the doctor as much as we do now? Will pregnant women of the New Silents still have to schedule visits with ultrasound technicians to see their growing fetus? Maybe not.

The latest fad in smart phone apps seems to be within medical information sharing and monitoring, enabling people to take charge of some of their health issues without setting foot in a doctor’s office.

Skin of Mine is a Medical Imaging app that lets you take pictures of surface blemishes and suspect moles, track them, and seek consultation from a real world doctor if you need.

Or what about monitoring your heart with your iPhone? SmartHeart, a smart phone enabled electrocardiagram (ECG) device that only takes 30 seconds to analyze your heart and email the results to your doctor. Simply strap a small monitor to your chest and push a few buttons on your phone.

A recent partnership between HP and PING (Positive Information for the Next Generation) will allow healthcare workers to monitor malaria outbreaks in Botswana using Palm Pre 2 smartphones and cloud computing technologies in at-risk areas.

These are just a few and we will certainly see more apps of this kind. So are smart phone apps the future of medicine? It’s not a solve-all solution, but I think they will be great supplements. The general trend is that most professions are becoming geography independent and digitalized. Remote controlling patients can reduce unproductive time for healthcare professionals and reduce costs associated with seeing patients in the office. As someone who has co-run a dental office for several years I have seen how much cost and time go into unproductive duties such as preparing operatories for patients, cleaning the waiting area, waiting for patients who are running late (and disgruntling patients when the doctors is running overtime). And this is not even mentioning the time and cost taken with processing insurance claims.

With the Baby Boomers reaching Medicare eligibility, the demand and cost for health care services are going to balloon. Mobile devices help patients monitor themselves, communicate with healthcare providers and can help triage nurses determine if the patient should be seen in person, or perhaps even let doctors diagnose over the net.

But I can also see a lot of liability issues. A big can of liability worms actually. But that’s another story.

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Source: Singularity Hub

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