The Future of Medicine: Improve Healthcare With Gadgets
Doctors and nurses are turning to tablets and smartphones to aid their everyday work, as a new generation of medical professionals lean on gadgets to make healthcare more efficient and cost-effective.
The Future of mHealth is our series that explores opportunities and challenges of mHealth, which aims to put widespread access to healthcare within the reach of those who need it most.
Mobile devices are proving instrumental for a growing number of healthcare professionals. Smartphones and tablets are progressing beyond ways for doctors and nurses to check in during a busy day, and becoming part of the very fabric of healthcare delivery.
Healthcare professionals use gadgets to consult with patients, manage workflow, get alerts from other healthcare players and soon will perform research and diagnose conditions with them as well.
Mobile technology is also being integrated into the training of nurses and doctors, ensuring the next generation of medical workers will be connected to devices playing key roles in patient care.
Managing Communication and Workflow with Mobile Devices
A new nursing initiative at a major Boston-area hospital underscores how deeply mobile devices are being integrated into medical professionals' work. Massachusetts General Hospital is rolling out the Voalte communications system this year, allowing nurses to receive voice calls, alarms and text messages about patient status, medications, emergencies, schedule changes and other events.
By turning smartphones into instant communication and remote monitoring devices, systems like Voalte's allow nurses to streamline work and prioritize notifications according to urgency and priority, wasting less time and effort as they care for multiple patients.
Doctors increasingly turn to smartphones, rather than tried-and-true pagers, to communicate, leading insurers and regulators to develop targeted mobile communications initiatives.
For example, Aetna insurance sends mobile alerts to doctors about patient care and claims, while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is seeking a developer for a mobile app that will alert medical personnel to drug reactions during public health crises.
Doctors are also using their devices to reach out to patients, forwarding test results, answers to questions and other information instantly, rather than waiting to receive and return a message.
As the demands on doctors' time increase, mobile devices will continue to expand their role in healthcare to fill the communications gap, especially as patients themselves become increasingly connected.
Putting Health Information at Hand, No Textbook Required
Many academic programs also integrate smartphones and tablets in curricula, releasing medical and nursing students from the burden of memorizing mountains of data.
Instead, medical training is retooling its focus to teach future nurses and doctors how to find, access and process reliable information, rather than stressing rote memorization.
A January New York Times article highlighted the trend in nursing, describing how incorporating mobile technology in nursing programs and healthcare settings prepares nurses to deliver more effective patient care. The trend does not mean nurses and doctors are less capable or responsible, but rather underscores the exploding volume of information needed to perform medical jobs and recognizes no one person can mentally stay on top of it all.
Mobile devices can alleviate this problem, putting access to the latest information at professionals' fingertips. Advances in graphic displays and touchscreens allow healthcare personnel to access even the most complex, detailed medical texts on a mobile device.
For example, Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, the "bible" of medical textbooks, recently became available for the iPad, complete with instructional videos and searchable text and medical illustrations.
Harrison's weighs in at over 4,000 pages and contains a level of minute detail that made it previously impossible to put it on any e-reader device. IPad advances, coupled with a digital publishing platform created for science and medicine, led a team to reconstruct the resource from the ground up, allowing every healthcare professional to easily find valuable information, without traveling back to their bookshelf to access it.
Vetting the Best Apps for Health
With the rise of mobile devices with healthcare professionals, medicine is now a prime market for advertisers and app developers. App stores are full of "healthcare" offerings for both consumer and professional audiences, but busy doctors don't have time to weed through the hype to find the ones that are truly effective, or search for health apps among dozens of unrelated tools.
As a result, doctors and healthcare organizations will increasingly turn to outside experts to find the apps and tools best suited to their needs. Happtique, an offshoot of Greater New York Hospital Association Ventures, built an app store for hospitals and doctors. Its pilot prgram involved eleven major New York hospitals.
Now, the company aims to create a "gold standard" for all medical apps and plans to create a set of criteria by which it will judge health applications, building a standards program around those criteria within the next six months.
Doctors will use Happtique to find the best apps for their own use, as well as identify those that are safest and best for their patients. Hospitals that wish to offer a set of custom healthcare apps to personnel will also be able to do so via Happtique.
Reportedly, there are 23,000 medical apps for iOS and Android devices alone, so the company faces a giant task ahead. However, as the need for trustworthy apps grows, Happtique and its future rivals will refine their techniques to cull the best apps for physicians and other healthcare professionals as competition in the app curation field heats up.
Distraction, Privacy Remain Hurdles
Smartphones and tablets are making doctors and nurses more reachable than ever before and also helping to streamline and focus their work for maximum benefit.
However, a constantly buzzing phone could also distract in a field that demands intense focus. According to a study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, phone calls, e-mails and face-to-face interactions interrupt doctors nearly five times an hour and mobile devices can potentially steal even more focus from patients.
So far, there isn't much evidence that mobile devices have directly led to patient harm. However, as mobile use increases in healthcare, doctors will need to create balance between constant connectedness and the need for single-minded focus on patients.
Doctors will need to keep patient privacy and confidentiality in mind, as well, especially if they text patients or access medical records on an unsecured device.
Smartphones are a convenient, quick way to answer questions and relay information, but aren't always the most secure channel. Doctors, nurses and the healthcare systems that employ them can expect to answer to both patients and regulators about their privacy measures as mobile health continues its forward march. ♦
Categories: News Desk