Wellapps

There is no shortage of people who want to take better control of their health. As technology continues to mature, data entry points will be uber-accessible allowing consumers to easily record symptoms anytime and anyplace.

How we record symptoms today:

You’re on your way to work in the car. You make a sharp left turn and get a shooting pain in your right hip. This happened once before about a month ago. You think to yourself… 1. Ouch 2. Wonder why that is happening 3. Gotta tell the doc about that. Maybe some tech savvy folks make a note on a digital voice recorder or leave themselves a voicemail. Six weeks later, you’re at the doc for a physical. Do you remember those two isolated incidents? Nope. Does the doctor ask you if you happen to have experienced shooting pains in your hip while making turns in you car? Nope. Could you and your doctor be missing something? Yep.

How it will happen soon:

Shooting pain in the right hip. You hit a button that enables interactive voice response (IVR). You record your symptom either through a set of recognizable pre-configured symptoms/questions based on your health conditions (maybe you have Arthritis), or free form.
Re-Enactment:

You hit the button.

IVR Medical Assistant – “Did you experience a symptom of a pre-existing condition?”

You – “No”

IVR Medical Assistant – “Record your symptom now.”

You – “I was making a sharp left turn on the West Side Highway and got a shooting pain in my right hip”.

IVR Medical Assistant - “Would you like to add this to the list of questions for your doctor?”

You – “Yes”

This information gets added to your medical bio and the symptom gets added to a list of questions for your doctor. The benefits:

1. You will now remember to ask your doctor about this during your next visit.
2. These symptoms are now in your medical record permanently.
3. These symptoms are auto-stamped with potentially relevant metadata – including date, time and location.
4. These symptoms are now searchable and indexed for research (at the discretion of the patient). Note that current semantic technology can recognize patterns and extract possible correlations. A quick crawl of a database could reveal that people in lower Manhattan who eat apples on Tuesdays have been getting a rash (random example, I know).
5. Proactive doctors will have the ability to monitor patient symptoms in real-time. Some will choose to preview a list of doc questions in advance of a visit to make more efficient use of their time. Others will monitor symptoms on a defined schedule to practice preventative health. Note that there are many issues that need to worked out with this one…including legal ramifications of a physician seeing real-time symptoms (malpractice), the commercial arrangement of a physician who spends time mentoring a patient out of the office, etc. These will all work themselves out over time just as they have with online banking (with a bit more oversight).

I used IVR as one example of convenient data entry from a moving vehicle. There are endless other points of data entry that are (and will be) available no matter where you are or what you are doing. Those who choose to be proactive about monitoring their health will have a set of tools to do just that. And all of this data is super valuable to the well being of the individual and the human-race at large.
Also see The Value of Patient Data