Mobile health technology is growing and thriving

Eric Topol felt a twinge of nostalgia when he stopped carrying around his trusty stethoscope. Dr. Topol, a cardiologist in San Diego, carries with him instead a portable ultrasound device roughly the size of a cellphone.

When he puts it to a patient’s chest, the device allows him to peer directly into the heart. The patient looks, too; together, they check out the muscle, the valves, the rhythm, the blood flow. ”Why would I listen to ‘lub dub’ when I can see everything?” Dr. Topol says.

The $8,000 device—called the Vscan, made by GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Co.—is just one entry in the booming field of mobile-health technology. In an era where many medical schools hand out iPods along with dissection kits, Dr. Topol, the chief academic officer for Scripps Health, a San Diego-based nonprofit health-care network, says smartphone apps, wireless sensors and other innovative tools hold “transformative potential.”

Portable ultrasound device

He and other physicians say the technology can not only improve diagnoses and treatment, but also revolutionize how doctors and patients think about health care. Mobile tools allow physicians to monitor vital signs, note changes in activity levels and verify that medications have been taken, without ever seeing a patient face to face.

That means fewer office visits—and fewer hospitalizations, since even very ill patients can be monitored from afar. For their part, patients can monitor their health in real time, gaining access to an unprecedented amount of data that will allow them to “take charge of their own health care,” Dr. Topol says.

Kelly Morris, a mother in Union Grove, Ala., sees the potential most clearly in a red plastic tag she clips to her daughter’s shirt each morning. One side of the tag reads: “In Case of Emergency.” The other instructs responders to text a unique PIN to the number 51020. Anyone who does so will receive a text offering detailed instructions for 13-year-old Michaela’s care. They’ll learn, for instance, that her particular form of epilepsy does not respond well to the most common seizure drugs and that certain medications make her manic.

“These are things I would like an emergency team to know,” Ms. Morris says. “It gives me the ability to say what I want to say, even if I’m not there.”

Another feature of the $10-a-year service allows trained medics, who are given special access codes, to pull up a preprogrammed list of the patient’s emergency contacts. The medic can swiftly notify them all—by automated text, email or phone call—that the patient is being taken to a specific hospital.

The technology, called “invisible bracelet,” was developed by Docvia LLC of Tulsa, Okla. In addition to the red plastic tags, the company sells key fobs and stickers that can be attached to ID cards and that carry the same instructions about texting a PIN in case of emergency.