More Uses for cellphones in healthcare

As cell phones (and smartphones) become the most prevalent technology in Doctor's offices and in patient's hands, more and more opportunities arise. Not only is it useful to doctors (e.g. for charge capture, patient lists, e-prescribing, drug look-up, etc.), but imagine being able to remind patients (automatically) to check blood sugars or blood pressures and automatically feed this information back into office-based systems. We have been seeing more and more research funded by NIH along these lines and the article by Peter Groen and Douglas Goldstein on Virtual Medical Worlds (click here) details many of the current programs and uses that are available.