WASHINGTON — What if my blood sugar’s too high today? Is it time for my blood pressure pill? With nagging text messages or more customized two-way interactions, researchers are trying to harness the power of cell phones to help fight chronic diseases.
“I call it medical minutes,” says Dr. Richard Katz of George Washington University Hospital in the nation’s capital.
He’s testing whether inner-city diabetics, an especially hard-to-treat population, might better control their blood sugar and thus save Medicaid dollars by tracking their disease using Internet-connected cell phones, provided with reduced monthly rates as long as they regularly comply.
Consider Tyrone Harvey, 43, who learned he had diabetes seven years ago only after getting so sick he was hospitalized for a week, and who has struggled to lower his blood sugar ever since. In May, through a study Katz began with nearby Howard University Hospital’s diabetes clinic, Harvey received a Web-based personal health record that he clicks onto using his cell phone, to record his daily blood sugar measurements.
If Harvey enters a reading higher or lower than preset danger thresholds, a text message automatically pings a warning, telling him what to do. And at checkups, doctors will use the personal health record, created by Indiana-based NoMoreClipboard.com, to track all his fluctuations and decide what next steps to advise.
“Hopefully you’re paying more attention to your numbers, too,” says Howard’s Dr. Gail Nunlee-Bland, whose clinic uses an electronic health record your official medical history that can automatically link to NoMoreClipboard’s consumer version and update it with things like medication changes.
The trend is called mobile health or, to use tech-speak, mHealth. If you’re a savvy smartphone user, you’ve probably seen lots of apps that claim to help your health or fitness goals using your phone like a pedometer or an alarm clock to signal when it’s time to take your medicine.
