Text Messaging For Patient Care

[Chirag 5]

Text Messaging for Patient Care

Telecom Direct

June 23, 2004

Physicians may soon be able to check on a patient's status after a hospital stay by text messaging the person's mobile phone.

Researchers at Reply-planeT, an Italian communications services provider, and the Istituto Nazionale Tumori, a research hospital in Milan, have developed and tested a wireless patient monitoring system that could help doctors detect a patient's current condition at a distance. Keeping up-to-date on a patient's condition once the person has left the hospital can help doctors to detect problems earlier and pursue any necessary intervention. "The wide and growing use of mobile phones and the Internet by the general population provides important new methods for communication between doctor and patient," wrote the researchers in the medical journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

The team's Wireless Health Outcomes Monitoring System (WHOMS) could reduce the need to use printed questionnaires for monitoring patients' health and quality of life, making doctor-patient communication faster and easier. The system allows physicians to send short questionnaires to patients' mobile phones. Patients can answer the questions using their phone keypad and then return the completed form to the physicians without leaving their chair or bed. The results are collated automatically and presented to the physician on a secure Web page. A graphic display gives doctors a quick overview of the patient's condition. If a patient has seriously modified symptoms, a flashing signal will appear by the person's name.

To test whether their system would work in the real world, the researchers asked all 97 cancer in-patients at the Istituto Nazionale Tumori--with the exception of those who had just had surgery and those who had visible physical impairments--to fill in a short survey using their mobile phone. All of the patients that attempted to complete the ten-question survey about their state of health did so successfully. "This confirmed the user-friendliness of the system for people familiar with modern communication technologies," claim the researchers.

However, 42 percent of the patients asked to participate in the study refused, mostly due to inexperience with using mobile phones. This was a larger percentage than the researchers had expected, but they hope that this figure might be reduced if a patients could get help from family members or if other channels of communication, such as the Internet, were incorporated into the system.

"We are currently introducing modifications aimed at improving the system," wrote the researchers. "In particular we are investigating multi-channel approaches so that we can offer WHOMS functions through Palm computers and interactive voice responders to provide a better interface and a wider choice for patients."