Mhealth – a promising future ?
Mobile health is likely to play an important role in the future of health supervision in many developing countries. A lot is being done to ensure that a wide range of issues like detecting counterfeit drugs, personalized individual health tips, diagnosis of mild diseases and medical prescriptions can be all done virtually over the phone. It is a very interesting proposition where the main idea is to have every individual’s medical data on a central data system secured. (In India there are talks about how each citizen should have a UID -a unique ID that would encompass all the identifications – right from driver’s licenses, birth certificate etc – it would be great if they could include the medical history too). Having the medical records on history makes the doctors and nurses’ work much simpler especially in countries where the doctor to patient ratio is 1: 1000. It becomes much easier for the doctor to be able to just hit a tab and have the entire medical history in front of her on the phone, right from the medicines ingested by the patient to any allergies that they could possibly have. This saves a lot of time and also gets rid of all the paper work otherwise involved. The whole process just gets quicker and more accurate.
In a lot of developing countries it is very easy to get prescription drugs over the counter without any actual prescription. There are no concrete rules to stop this from happening and hence a lot of times chemists sitting behind the counter (often not very well informed) assume the role of doctors. With mobile health and little cooperation from the local government it is possible to try to bring some more uniformity to this structure. Maybe it is possible to have a system where there is a barcode on the phone that acts like a prescription and that has to be scanned before releasing any prescribed drugs; maybe this would reduce the instances of drug overdose. It is just an idea I am not too sure if people have tried to materialize it just yet.
I am sure there are many more uses many more ways a mobile phone could be used to help improve the health sector in the developing countries and in the world at large.
For the people interested there is a mobile health conference at Stanford University from May 3 – May 5, 2011.
http://www.mobilehealth2010.org/
by Supriya Jain
2 comments
What can I do if I really feel these kinds of policys are unfair. The place would you suggest I voice my considerations to the federal government? I think many people could be interested by hearing what it’s important to say.
The scope of mhealth has indeed become huge, from what it began as. Now the doctors want to carry ipads and have access to data on the go, enter their patient details and maintain history etc. It is no more a dream come true for doctors & hospital staff to leave behind paper driven reports or desktop system driven analysis and carry a sleek ipad in their coat pockets, make decisions on the go, access information even on the move & last but not the least be accessible anywhere anytime.
Similarly, for patients there are a lot of applications available across their choice of mobile platforms which allow them to monitor their health and from what the research infers is that these apps have saved lives of many and has improved their lifestyle for good. So as the old saying was “an apple a day keeps doctor away”, has transformed to “app on your smartphone keeps the doctor away”…
Endeavour is pioneer in developing healthcare focussed applications spanning from users such as Doctors & hospital staff to patients to pharmacists & sales force.