Clinic reports via text message?

Ever think you could get clinic reports via text message, a voice-call system or on the Internet using a computer or Internet-enabled cellphone? Well, this technology is available and is being used on a daily basis -- in Rwanda.

According to the article, "Wireless Technology Speeds Health Services in Rwanda" in The New York Times, "Voxiva, a United States company ... has built a system that lets health workers send reports by cellphone directly from the field" which has connected 75% of the Rwanda's 340 clinics (approx 32,000 patients). Prior to this technology, doctors/officials had to send notes by hand to other clinics. Rwanda is a "country of one thousand hills, so it often takes one month to receive a message from the field about a disease outbreak or drug shortage."

Because most of the population has mobile phones, this technology can be used by individual patients to send text messages "to authenticate code numbers on individual [pharmaceutical] bottles." In addition, "each time a new patient enters the system, the information is sent in, while weekly reports cover data like a clinic's stocks of drugs, and monthly reports cover the number of patients under treatment. Clinics receive messages including the results of laboratory tests and drug recall alerts sent by the ministry of health."

If this technology is available, why not have it widely available in the United States? Why does each caregiver/patient have to go running around from office to office?

One main reason: HIPPA

This is the reason Personal Health Records (PHRs) are so important -- and why creating a "health URL" (as Adam Bosworth, VP of engineering at Google and head of GoogleHealth, stated in his speech) is so important.