Modern mobile phones have some built-in features that can be very useful in the healthcare environment. “They produce sounds and also pick them up with their built-in microphones, they have an accelerometer that can detect position and measure movements, they have a high-quality camera, and the smartphone screen is even higher quality than ultrasound machines that are used in any center. world doctor “Julio Mayol, director of the San Carlos Clinical Hospital Innovation Unit, listed yesterday during his speech at EmTechSpain 2012, the event organized by MIT to present new emerging technologies. And if we add geolocation to all that, which in the case of a patient allows knowing exactly where they are and who they are, the possibilities multiply. So it is not surprising that applications have been created for smartphones such as Skin scan , which detects in a minute the risk of a skin tumor being malignant , or programs to detect vision problems with the phone, and even applications that, With a sensor attached to the mobile device, they allow to measure sugar levels in diabetics in real time and easily. There are even programs that go beyond diagnosis and treat, for example, hearing problems.
“And given that chronicity is the hot-topic of current medicine , it is a breakthrough to think that chronic diseases can be managed and assess the monitoring of treatment in real time with mobile applications, ” says Julio Mayol. An excellent example is an insurer in the US that has created Kaiseer Permanente , the mobile application that gives a patient access to all their health information, from their appointments and prescriptions, to medical records.
Although the outlook is very promising, Mayol admits that none of this makes sense if we do not rethink the healthcare model . “In the classic model, the primary care doctor was the gatekeeper, the doorman who regulated access to the system; but that would have to change,” he says. Mobile health is a challenge because a lot of information is generated that is not currently integrated into the health system and that can cause new problems and concerns for patients. “With the new apps, a melanoma is diagnosed in just 20 seconds, but it takes weeks or even months before the health system calls us in, confirms the diagnosis and begins a treatment,” reflects Mayol.
