When Mythili Rajagopal, consultant paediatrician at Isabel Hospital gets a visit from a one-year-old patient, she quickly whips out her iPad and opens up a ‘Match the Colour’ game and gets the child to play.
“After a couple of rounds, I can gauge a lot about the child – whether she is receiving enough stimulus at home, whether her intellect is developing normally – while at the same time keeping the child engaged,” she said.
Many doctors across the city have started using mobile technology to help enhance their practice.
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“Smartphones are everywhere, so doctors need to be able to use them effectively to be able to keep up with the large number of patients they see,” Bruce Schwack, communications head, Mooneye Group said. “Patients are able to look up information online and many are even able to tell doctors when there are contra-indications for a certain drug. Doctors need to use technology to keep up with these patients,” he said.
Dr. Rajagopal uses a number of apps — from games that keep patients engaged and apps that help patients understand their condition to a reminder app that helps her wish patients for their birthdays.
For Sanjeev V. Nair, consultant nephrologist at Madras Medical Mission, the mobile phone is a tool to monitor patients who are on peritoneal dialysis. “We encourage patients to send us updates on WhatsApp. When they have a problem and are not in town, they take a picture of the equipment and we can decide whether they need to go to a doctor, or if the problem can be dealt with at home,” he said. He also advises patients with chronic kidney disease to use an app to calculate their Glomerular filtration rate (GFR).
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Although there are many technologies available, there are very few Indian apps available. This can be an issue, especially when it comes to communicating with patients and dosages, doctors say.
“When it comes to antibiotics, all of the good apps that are available are made in the U.S., so doctors can only use the data from the app as a loose guideline,” said B. Sudhakar Subramaniam, consultant anaesthesiologist at SRM Institute of Medical Sciences.
“Right now, we are using mainly American apps for Indian patients, which do not deal with differences in language, or even transliterating Tamil or Hindi into English,” said Biswajit Baruah, consultant orthopaedician, Apollo Speciality Clinic, Teynampet.
Many doctors have started using mobile technology to help enhance their practice and improve their patient interactions
However, there are still few Indian apps available for doctors