“How have you seen the approach to patient-centered care evolve over the past few years? In a way, it’s started to evolve with the whole mHealth movement. And the focus on consumer apps… …I am absolutely convinced that the role of the smartphone in our life, it’s going to be a coaching tool, it’s going to be a diagnostic tool, it’s going to be a reminding tool, and you;’re certainly seeing applications built out from that”

Although there’s a small caveat (“there’s a lot of hype and very little reality”) I think we can put this down to the various misleading Fast-forward-to-the-Future articles as in general this article is in sharp contrast to the Hype and Hope of “mHealth” article he authored on the Intel blog in August 2010 (read my thoughts about this post here).

It’s great to see that he’s no longer so “worried that we don’t really know what each other is talking about when we say mHealth…” or about the risks “in trumpeting the power of mHealth prematurely“.

I suppose it becomes hard to complain about “high-gloss images of mobile phones and heart signals” when Doctors here in rural Ireland are already using such technology with their high street bought mobile phones in the rural homes of their senior patients and eminent Cardiologists like Leslie Saxon MD at the USC Keck School of Medicine are publishing the results of research on the self directed use of this tool by patients at the American College of Cardiology’s 61st Annual Scientific Session!