Early Adopters of Smartphone-based Healthcare Show Interesting Trends
[Thursday, July 25, 2019] An editorial in the British Medical Journal provides one of the first clinical perspective on smartphone based basic healthcare from a large real world data. Patients in London were provided a smartphone app-based algorithm, called GP at Hand, where almost all initial contacts between patients and physicians were through smartphone consultations, with the patients having the option to visit their physicians only for problems that could not be resolved on the phone. Like all early adopters of new technologies, GP at Hand, was preferred by younger, educated and working populations who were generally healthy. These patients found the smartphone service convenient as it helped them avoid visiting clinics to solve minor health issues, while still being able to talk to a physician. More sick, older patients and those with chronic disease requiring frequent interactions with the doctors, did not prefer the smartphone services. This study provides a good perspective of the limitations and promise of remote medical care technologies. These technologies can be used to reduce the clinic visits for routine and occasional medical issues leaving the clinics free to deal with sicker patients, thereby reducing cost of the providing healthcare for all. It is true that with sicker patients coming to the clinic the time-needed per patient and the associated costs would rise but these costs will be off-set by the patients who are managed remotely and cost much less to provide satisfactory healthcare. In fact, major providers are already using smartphone-based technologies to reduce burden on their systems. More than half of Kaiser Permanente’s patient-doctor interactions are done remotely via smartphones. The technology is particularly promising for resource-limited countries where smartphones are widely available, but healthcare is not. Although the results of the study are not surprising, this should help developers of such technologies convince investors and providers to increase use of such technologies, and developing AI based algorithms that can further reduce the cost of care. |
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