The Washington Post last week featured a piece on the use of cell phone cameras as mobile health devices. Profiling GWU emergency physician Neal Sikka, who in May launched a 6-month study to see how accurately emergency doctors and physician assistants (PA) at GWU Hospital could diagnose wounds from cell phone pictures.

In his study, researchers ask patients who arrive with injuries at the hospital to take pictures of their injuries, fill out a questionnaire, and then e-mail it to a physician or PA, who then reviews it and makes a diagnosis. The physician or PA meets with the patient to see if the diagnosis via cell phone images was correct. Sikka says about 90% of diagnoses have been accurate. The diagnoses that don’t work tend to be because the images were not high quality enough or the patient didn’t provide enough information.

“Mobile Health,” or mHealth as it is frequently called, has the potential to be a real game-changer. This literally is telemedicine. As patients and physicians become increasingly addicted their smartphones (i.e. Crackberries), the number of uses they can have to improve health care access are numerous. If we’re committed to patient-centered care, these kinds of solutions must be seriously considered, in particular for patients in more rural areas. Health care as we know it is going to change.

And, no surprise to cardiology -- some EMS systems send crude cell phone ECG images to ERs when STEMI is suspected. We need better technology than this, but it’s coming. Everybody today has a cell phone. They are going to be increasingly central in new ‘point of care’ innovations in mobile settings. These kinds of services will also extend through programs like our patient education campaign, CardioSmart, to provide care information and clinical answers to patients in this fashion soon.

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