Growing Interest in Cell Phone Access to PHRs

Riding the wave of iPhone-mania, recently a PHR company (MedeFile) made a public claim that its service works on the iPhone. Though as blogger Matthew Holt points out, given that the iPhone offers access to any content on the Internet, the claim isn’t such an impressive one. Nevertheless, since most Americans now have cell phones—and indeed there are nearly as many mobile as traditional phones—their use as a means to access PHR applications is likely to become more common.

Project HealthDesign grantees are ahead of the trend. In their effort to integrate PHRs as unobtrusively as possible into patients’ everyday lives, several of the nine teams have chosen to use cell phones as a platform for PHR access.

For example, a team at Univeristy of Washington University is working to enable ongoing communication between patients with chronic illness and their providers via cell phone. The hope is that regular monitoring will minimize crises and help patients to feel better on a daily basis. The team is developing a device that lets patients with diabetes record their blood glucose levels, blood pressure, food intake and exercise patterns and send them wirelessly, by cell phone, to their providers, who feed the data into a medical record and provide advice and feedback to patients as necessary.

Meanwhile, another Project HealthDesign team at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is designing a personal digital assistant (PDA) that uses prompts to remind patients with chronic pain to take their medicines and enables patients to record, share and visually analyze a record of their symptoms over time.

PHR access via cell phone is a logical idea that will soon get a push from a new source of funding. On September 15^th, Microsoft plans to issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) titled "Cell Phone as a Platform for Healthcare." The $700,000 RFP, targeted at academic institutions, calls for research that examines mobile phone health applications for rural, urban and worldwide communities and determines the infrastructures necessary to support them. See the blog by Microsoft's worldwide health director, Bill Crounse, M.D. for more details.

Comments

[Bernard Farrell]

I wonder whether Google/Microsoft's move into the PHR field (http://tinyurl.com/yqtztf) will impact this positively.

I do hope so.

[Lygeia Ricciardi]

Thanks for your various comments. It will be interesting to see how the entrance of these deep-pocketed players from outside of health care impacts development of the PHR market. From the perspective of consumers, the more entrants the better, IF the PHR developers all adhere to interoperable technical standards and consistent ways of addressing privacy and other "policy" issues. But that's a big "if".

[Lygeia Ricciardi (Project HealthDesign blogger)]

See also this Oct 2nd article from the Canadian "National Post" about patients using cell phones to manage chronic illnesses: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=ba0cc4f6-3beb-42e4-a35c-b22dac5e37d0&k=0