Helping Patients See the Light

Thomas Goetz of Wired Magazine spoke recently at TEDMED about the potential to leverage the voluntary compliance of patients by presenting them information that is personal, relevant and actionable. In my opinion, our nation cannot rise up to the challenge of providing quality medical care to all citizens without more effectively engaging patients as their (our) own best primary caregivers. Goetz points our that a sense of self efficacy is more effective in producing compliance behaviors (exercise more, stop smoking, and so forth) than is fear as a source of self motivation. Most people want to be healthy. Most people don't want to die a premature death. Goetz believes that "packaging" information for people is an effective way to gain compliance. I believe it is also a way to help reduce overall costs.

Direct link to YouTube video below

iPhone ECG Application

My guess is that apps will also be written for purposes of verifying medical compliance. For example, Medicare does not want to continue to pay for CPAP devices that are not being used by patients. An application could be created that would interface with the SD card in the machine to verify that the patient has actually used the machine at least four hours a night.