mHealth Revisited

Picture it, about 300 years into the future.  Humans have finally left the confines of Earth and are roaming the galaxy.  Upon encountering a new planet they decide to send an away team.  On the planet, unfortunately, one of the team members is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation.  The accompanying medical officer pulls out his medical tricorder.  This device not only can scan the person to check vitals and cause of illness or injury, it also sends this important information back to the central computer on the starship for possible therapeutic advice, past medical records for the individual, and it collects data for future care.


Ok, by now I am sure you can tell that I am a Trekkie.  A proud one!  But does Gene Roddenberry paint a picture that far off the mark, or could this be a possibility one day?

Lets bring our timeline back to January 13, 2015.  At work I stopped to talk to a coworker.  She proudly showed me a new device that she had purchased that tracked her steps, calories burned and some other data was collected.  Ok, so this isn’t as sophisticated as Star Trek’s medical tricorder, but it is just the beginning of a new frontier called mobile health or mHealth.


Mobile health is still in its infancy, however it is growing swiftly.  With the proliferation of smart phones and tablet devices, we are now able to take more technology with us.  As a matter of fact, according to Howard Larkin (2011), app stores for many of the popular smart devices, collectively held over 17,000 medical related apps in 2011 (Larkin, 2011, p. 24).  Nowadays you can get apps that track your running times and speeds, apps that monitor the way you sleep and even apps that act as your own personal trainer in the gym.  And these are just the consumer apps.  Milosevic, Milenkovic and Jovanov (2013) showed us, how UAH had created an app that allowed them monitor the movement of people with a “fall risk”, these being named sTUG and mWheelness (Milosevic et al, 2013, p. 47).  These apps were used in specific studies to gather information for care of future patients.


This new way of gathering information and providing therapy is important because it is paving the way to collecting mountains of valuable data that can be used for future treatments and preventative care.  There are some cases where it is being used to help people in remote parts of the world, with little access to healthcare professionals.  It is helping to prevent sedentary lifestyles for some and becoming the first line of defense against illness.  What about the future, you ask?


The future looks bright for these technologies.  Just recently, with the release of iPhone 5s in 2013, Apple included a new microchip specifically designed for “health applications.”  There has also been a surge of wearable devices to create a BAN for those who want it.  What about Roddenberry’s tricorder?  Well according to Adam Pliskin (2014), Google, taking a cue from Star Trek, intended to create a system like the medical tricorder of that television series (Pliskin, 2014).


How is that for “going where no man has gone before?”

References:

Larkin, H. (2011). mHealth. Hospitals & Health Networks, 85(4), 22-6, 2. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/865328282?accountid=14552


Milosevic, M., Milenkovic, A., & Jovanov, E.  (2013).  mHealth @ UAH: Computing infrastructure for mobile health and wellness monitoring.  XRDS, 20(2), pp.43-49.  DOI: 10.1145/2539269


Pliskin, A. (2014).  Google X Aims To Build ‘Star Trek’ Tricorder And Change Healthcare. Elite Daily. Retrieved from http://elitedaily.com/news/technology/google-x-building-tricorder/834907/

Is cloud computing safe for healthcare?

So I am learning today one of the pitfalls of this new [old] technology called Cloud computing.  AWS, the cloud service from Amazon, has gone down.  How did I notice?  It took Netfilx down with it, meaning I am missing out on my Star Trek marathon I had planned for Christmas Eve.  So this has me thinking.  How can we trust cloud computing?  Can we trust it with healthcare, where there are so many life or death decisions made everyday?  What ways can be implemented to ensure uptime if using cloud computing in healthcare?  Any thoughts?

Link: Netflix Down!!

eHealth, Patient-Interaction and Data Quality

eHealth, Patient-Interaction and Data Quality

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest.  Have you ever heard of these?  Of course you have.  Over the last several years, consumer interaction with computers has soared.  People are now shopping, video chatting, expressing themselves, posting pictures and conducting business using computers, and this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the computer is being used to interact with the world.  And the computer is not the only means.  Using smartphones, the masses can now do all of this on the go, creating a never-ending flow of information.  What is this information made of? Data!

It is only natural that the healthcare industry, now venturing into the IT world, would want to jump on the train to ride the information highway.  With all the human computer interactions going on, and in the lay community, it only makes sense to find a way to have patients interact with their own health data.

Hesse & Shneiderman (2007) wrote the following in the abstract of their article.

“New advances in eHealth are prompting developers to ask “what can people do?” How can eHealth take part in national goals for healthcare reform to empower relationships between healthcare professionals and patients, healthcare teams and families, and hospitals and communities to improve health equitably throughout the population?” (Hesse & Shneiderman, 2007)

The data that is used by patients and providers goes beyond the one-to-one relationship between them.  This is the value that the emerging area of eHealth brings.  The physician is a “microunit” of a larger systems, which includes the care delivery team (nurses, office staff, etc) and the patient is also a “microunit”, surrounded by family & friends, and the community (Hesse & Shneiderman, 2007).

One way that patients can help improve quality of data is by looking up information on their own, and through a provider-sponsored portal (Geissbühler, 2012).  This will help them in “assisting” the provider with pinpointing their issues, while having a reliable source of information. 

Another emerging trend are “patient-controlled health information exchanges” (Geissbühler, 2012).  These are ways that a patient can control access to their health information, federating documents from several providers or organizations and even provide their own contributions (Geissbühler, 2012). 

A third way patients can interface with their health information is by using their “’digital proxy’, a mobile, always-on, permanently connected, and context-aware device such as a smartphone.” (Geissbühler, 2012).  Also homes can be made intelligent, and they can be made aware of the needs of their inhabitants (Geissbühler, 2012). 

Some of this may seem science fiction, but this is the way the health industry is moving.  People are getting more comfortable with sharing information online in the social networking world.  The use of smartphones is proliferating and can be a valuable asset.  All of this information sharing, and allowing patients to control their own data will help to increase data quality on a whole.  This is good not only for the patient, but also for the providers and the communities that the patients live in.

References:

Geissbühler, A.  (2012 June 2012).  eHealth: easing the transition in healthcare.  Swiss Medical Weekly, 142.  doi:10.4414/smw.2012.13599

Hesse, B. W. & Shneiderman, B.  (2007 May).  eHealth research from the user’s perspective.  American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 32(5), pp. S97 – 103.  DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2007.01.019