I’m obviously a big fan of the Alivecor ECG device and the plethora of mHealth opportunities it will open up but it’s clear that not everyone has the imagination to see the possibilities that emerge when you combine medical technology with the low cost smartphones that billions of people already carry in their pockets.
In their review of the Alivecor ECG device the iMedicalApps reviewers seem to once again be overly concerned with what they perceive to be “hype”.
Ultimately like a lot of decisions that are made in Healthcare I think it’s going to come down to individuals making a judgement call.
Here are some people who have publicly expressed opinions about this device and it’s clinical value:
Residents Satish Misra MD and ltifat Husain MD: “there are important outstanding questions regarding appropriate utilization of the AliveCor Heart Monitor to ensure we are in fact benefiting our patients and not harming them or wasting their resources with unnecessary testing“
Dr Eric Topol, Cardiologist and Chief Academic Officer, Scripps Health: “This explosion is about to make our healthcare better and cheaper“
Leslie A. Saxon MD, Chief Division of Cardiovascular Medicine USC Keck School of Medicine: Ubiquitous Wireless ECG Recording: A Powerful Tool Physicians Should Embrace
Dr. Ben Freedman, MBBS, PhD, FACC, Cardiologist, Department of Cardiology, Concord Hospital and Professor of Cardiology at the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia: Study Points to Mobile Device Breakthrough in Community Screening
Dr Daniel Kraft, Faculty Chair of Medicine at the Singularity University: “The ability to have your phone tie to your healthcare record and track medical metrics will have vast repercussions“
Professor John Camm, QHP, MD, FRCP, FRCP, FACC, FESC, FMedSci, FHRS, CStJ, British Heart Foundation Professor of Clinical Cardiology: “As a professor of cardiology, John Camm had diagnosed hundreds of patients with the irregular heartbeat condition atrial fibrillation. But it wasn’t until he took his own pulse as part of a research experiment that he realised he had the condition“
What do you think?
David, I don’t perceive the Imedicalapps review of AliveCor as negative. I do agree with them that to date much of the discussion has been based on hype. We do need the healthcare industry to play a more active role in properly evaluating how the new technology can be used, and provide feedback for its future development.
Few people can be as forward thinking as Dr Topol and Dr Albert, but in reality they will be the bulk of users, so we need to enable them to experiment with these technologies to discover use models that are relevant to them. That includes recognizing the limitations and determining which of these we are willing to live with, and which we want remedied.
I look forward to more such articles, hopefully in the media that the bulk of healthcare providers and patients read. That way we can move away from the cloistered fan club mentality we have in MHealth today to making it generally available tool upon which clinical innovation can be developed.