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Health Care: mHealth Technology Bring Both Benefits and Risks
Almost every industry is under some amount of transformation due to rapid changes in technology, and HealthCare is one industry in particular where radical changes are under way. The annual global healthcare market is now estimated to be a $6 trillion and is estimated by analysts at Espicom to top 10 percent of global GDP by 2015, reaching $8.4 trillion.
Technology has enabled consumers to become better informed about their healthcare needs. Juniper estimates that in 2011, 44 million health-related mobile apps were downloaded, and that is expected to increase to 146 million apps by 2016. The analyst firm research2guidance estimates that the 2011 market size for mHealth smartphone mobile apps to be US$718 million in 2011. And, during those twelve months, the number of mHealth applications doubled and the revenues increased by a factor of seven. PEW Research estimates that 17 percent of all smartphone users have some sort of mHealth application.
There are apps for fitness and for tracking medical information. Technology is changing the way we communicate with our doctors. Increasingly there will be remote checkups, treatments and diagnostics.
One downside of new technologies though has been something called the ‘distracted doctor’ by the New York Times. Much like studies that have found the dangerous consequences of texting while driving, a study published in the medical journal Perfusion found that the use of cellphones easily distract doctors during their work, resulting in deadly consequences. Amazingly, the study found some doctors admitting to routinely using a cell phone while performing a cardiopulmonary bypass operation. 55 percent of doctors that have performed this type of operation say that they’ve used a cell phone during the operation, while 49 percent have sent text messages. The Perfusion study calls this behavior unsafe and potentially disastrous.
Abraham Verghese, a doctor and professor at the Stanford University Medical Center and a best-selling medical writer, said that “the computer has become a good place to get a result, communicate with other people. In the interest of preventing medical error, it’s a good friend.” But doctors can often forget the real patient when they focus exclusively on data and numbers — the iPatient. Verghese said that “The iPatient is getting wonderful care across America., but the real patient wonders, ‘Where is everybody?’ “
