How Digital Symptom Tracking Is Remaking Medicine For The Better

The use of telehealth allows doctors to supplement in-person visits with remote visits, enabling more frequent check-ins with patients who need them.

The rapid expansion of telemedicine during the pandemic has given us a glimpse of a possible future for medicine — one in which remote visits can greatly expand access to care, and even improve care for complex conditions like chronic pain, heart disease, mental illness or substance use disorder. But the expanded use of telemedicine solutions is only the first step in the digital evolution of care. Digital health’s next move involves doctors and patients working together to track, and understand, vital signs and symptoms between appointments while patients are at home.

During the pandemic, we’ve already seen the potential for telehealth to enable better and more cost-effective care. The use of telehealth allows doctors to supplement in-person visits with remote visits, enabling more frequent check-ins with patients who need them.

Take a patient with heart disease. Under normal, pre-pandemic conditions, this patient might see his doctor every two months. Now imagine that during those two months, the patient has been experiencing slowly increasing shortness of breath. The slow onset of this symptom makes it unlikely that the patient will view it as serious enough to call his doctor — and yet, after two months, he could be nearing congestive heart failure. The ability to use brief remote check-ins to bridge between appointments could be life-saving for patients like this. The same holds true for many mental health patients, whose conditions have the potential to rapidly become much more severe. A quick video call with a patient could help a doctor spot emerging problems sooner before they require serious intervention.

The Next Phase

These advantages are powerful, but they’re only the beginning. The next step in the evolution of digital health is at-home symptom tracking for both physical and mental health conditions. Many wearable devices and devices suited for at-home use already exist that can help patients and doctors monitor symptoms like their heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, blood sugar levels and more. Research has shown that wearable devices can be useful in a variety of situations, including at-home stroke rehabilitation and ongoing monitoring of heart patients.

At Lucid Lane, we use smartphone apps to help patients monitor their mental health by answering a set of questions about their symptoms daily and recording a sample of their voice, which can be analyzed to detect signs of worsening depression.

During the pandemic, researchers have been rapidly developing wearables and smartphone apps for monitoring symptoms of Covid-19. One such experimental tool, a patch placed on the throat to monitor respiratory symptoms, has not yet been proven to detect new cases but has been helpful in alerting doctors and nurses to worsening symptoms in hospitalized patients. Smartphone apps for tracking coronavirus symptoms have also proliferated, and sales of pulse oximeters, an at-home device for measuring oxygen saturation levels, have spiked. Particularly in a crisis, people are eager to better understand their own health.

After the pandemic passes, expect to see continued use of wearable devices, at-home devices and apps for symptom tracking for a variety of conditions. As with other telehealth tools, ongoing symptom monitoring is most useful for patients with complex conditions that are at risk of rapidly spiraling into greater severity, including heart disease, diabetes, mental illness and substance use disorder.

The Digital Doctor Visit

Thanks to these tools, the doctor visit of the future could become much more collaborative. Instead of a doctor measuring vital signs and asking questions, then typing away in an electronic health record, doctor and patient could sit together and review the data the patient has collected. This greater level of detail could help doctors identify patterns and patients to better interpret them.

Say, for example, data collected at home shows that a patient with an anxiety disorder tends to suffer more acute insomnia at certain times of the month. Ongoing data tracking could help both doctor and patient spot this pattern and work together to understand the root cause. Similarly, more ongoing data tracking could help a patient with chronic pain identify triggers that worsen her pain and work with her doctor to develop a plan to manage those triggers so she can safely taper off of pain medication.

At-home symptom tracking does come with risks, however. Some symptoms and vital signs exhibit a lot of essentially random fluctuation that could alarm patients unnecessarily if they’re not prepared for what they see. For example, blood pressure is known to fluctuate throughout the day as patient activity and stress levels change. If doctors are asking patients to monitor signs and symptoms at home, they must provide the context patients need to understand what types of readings are normal, what factors can affect those readings and when an abnormal reading requires a call to the doctor.

That caveat aside, the use of telemedicine, including at-home or wearable symptom trackers, has the potential to provide greater continuity of care. When doctors can see a patient with a complex condition once a week for a quick virtual check-in, and gather data about that patient every day through the use of at-home devices or apps, they can spot developing problems before they get too serious. Patients can also take much more ownership over their own care, empowering them to feel like active partners in managing a serious condition. Telehealth tools, including data collection tools, have the potential to transform patient care for the better.

The original article can be found at: Forbes (Innovation)