“After a medical exam of the future, patients will not only be sent home with prescriptions. They’ll also leave the office with an assignment: download apps.

“We envision a world where doctors actually prescribe applications with drugs and with other treatments,” Matt Berry, founder and CEO of Orca Health said”

I’ve been around long enough to remember when the internet was new and unfamiliar and future gazers used to predict things such as “During the medical exam of the future Doctors will actually go online to look things up”.

As we’ve seen patient access to information means the journey starts a long time before this eg. 80% of US internet users have looked online for health information and a lot of these searches are conducted before these individuals present to a Doctor. Add to this acknowledgement that the speed of advances in the mobile industry mean that Doctors and Patients are no longer even on a level playing field: patients now often have greater access to info and increasingly own and use more advanced communication technologies than their Doctors.

In my opinion in the future patients will use mobile services to avoid Doctor consultations and have more appropriate and effective consultations with better informed carers.

As we’re already seeing Doctors are increasingly providing rich mobile content to their patients:

And as we’re experiencing at 3G Doctor, mHealth services will increasingly be used by patients instead of going to the Doctors office: