WSJ: Health care via your smartphone

• JOURNAL REPORTS              Updated February 14, 2013, 9:29 p.m. ET

The Wireless Revolution Hits Medicine

Eric Topol talks about the upheaval that’s coming as the digitization of health care meets the smartphone

Dr Topol has several devices that he uses, via his smartphone, to assess his patients.  One is used to track glucose levels for diabetes patients – imagine being able to track a patient’s diabetes levels “all day-long” and charting their history.  He’s doing this now!  Here’s a short excerpt!  See the full article at the link above.

WSJ: What’s the particular role of the smartphone?

DR. TOPOL: We’re all essentially surgically connected to our smartphones, and we’re still in the early stages of realizing their medical potential. But they should be a real threat to the medical profession.

I use a portable pocket ultrasound device instead of a stethoscope to listen to the heart, and I share it with the patient in real time. “Look at your valve, look at your heart-muscle strength.”

You can get an add-on to a smartphone which does eye refraction and then texts [the prescription] to get your glasses made. If you’re an optometrist, you might be worried about that. Or you can get your skin lesion scanned and get a text back quickly that there’s nothing to worry about. If you’re a dermatologist, that’s a big part of your practice. You will be able to take a DNA sequence on a USB port and pop it into your smartphone and get data out of it. It just goes on and on.