Patient, heal thyself

Some doctors complain about their ‘informed’ patients. With so much medical information easily accessible on the web, we tend to read up before we go for medical consultation. Patients are increasingly confident of engaging the doctor on the diagnosis, and prescribed treatment, suggesting alternatives. All this can be quite annoying to a person who has spent years to reach a level of specialisation and does not like to be challenged by novices.

But the doctors had better get ready for more to come. Various start-ups are busy creating a new industry of consumer medicine that goes far beyond directly advertising to consumers to pick up an analgesic from the store shelves. And this is in medical diagnostics. Many companies are working to develop home diagnostic kits that can help you catch early signs of more sophisticated problems such as kidney disease.

The new developments increase consumers’ access to information and substitute some of the doctor’s evaluative skill with the that of the technology’s.

Currently, lab requests are initiated by a doctor’s office in the US. But some companies such as Wellness FX and Laboratory Corp. of America are tapping into the need for consumers to access important and sensitive data directly without going through a doctor. This would include not just the usual tests but also, say, genetic information, identifying bio-markers, and so on.

More interesting developments are those that are taking advantage of the availability of wearables around your wrist, such as Fitbit or the new Apple watch, that can also monitor the body. Another gadget, devised by a company called Scanudu looks like a thick round disc which when pressed against the forehead can measure body temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat and oxygen in the blood. Connected to a smartphone app, the vital signs are analysed. The Food and Drug Administration, a US regulator, has helped these innovations move along by requiring accuracy before such gadgets can be sold to consumers.

These developments are going to disrupt the industry in several ways. Diagnostic labs have to be prepared to see a shift in the demand for their services, away from the more basic ones that consumers can now use at home. They have to think of providing additional services, such as throwing in a doctor’s consultation.

Hospitals can process a larger number of patients in a day as patients come prepared with more diagnostic data. Visits can fall as the data may be directly transmitted to the clinic and the doctor may decide there is no need for a visit and prescribe online. Closer monitoring by the patient will lead to problems being caught earlier.

The downside of all this is whether the consumer is educated enough to handle the information. While the technology and state of knowledge in medicine allows the gadgets to analyse data and give a recommendation, it will be a while before we are ready to trust them for serious illnesses.

The diagnostic results may need to be read concurrently with other data, to avoid Type I (incorrect rejection of a true situation) or Type II (failure to reject a false situation) errors.

Yet, we may not be too far from a situation where the doctor’s prescription would include a wearable gadget that would beam data to the doctor’s computer so she is better informed about your body before she decides on treatment.

The writer is a professor at the Jindal Global Business School, Delhi NCR, and at Suffolk University, Boston

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