It’s my contention that telehealth, or whatever it is called then, will only start to have a really significant impact on reducing the burden on caregivers when the technology begins to move from decision support to decision taking; only then will clinicians be able to disengage from needing to be involved in every decision regarding a patient’s treatment and focus on those decisions requiring significant skill and judgement. Sure there are all sorts of genuine hurdles in the way like ensuring that the decision-making process is not compromised by other genuine – or rogue – processes taking place on whatever the smartphones is called in the future that is processing and transmitting information, and there have been several recent warnings on malicious hacking of medical devices, so it won’t be happening any time soon. However, given the way so many medical processes that began with manual involvement have moved steadily towards automation, from ECG to Point-Of-Care-Testing, hopefully one day these problems will be solved.
One pointer, reported in iMedicalApps, is three trials currently underway using smartphones to control artificial pancreases to manage diabetes. The smartphones in this case are completely locked down and are only used for the decision-taking process around closed-loop insulin delivery. Nevertheless it’s a step.
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