Guest posting by Alisa Momin
The FDA has recently given a second clearance to Sense4Baby1, a new fetal and maternal monitoring product by AirStrip Technologies that includes a wearable monitoring device (shown below), specialized Sense4Baby software pre-loaded onto a smartphone or tablet, and a web-based portal for healthcare providers to view and assess the monitored and entered data. The FDA approval clears the product for non-stress testing by pregnant mothers in their own homes.
This is only one example of an overall greater interest in and adoption of technology that promotes patient self-administration. What does this new type of technology mean for patient health and the doctor-patient relationship? There are many obvious positive aspects that I can name just off the top of my head: patients no longer need to travel to their doctor’s office, patients have instantaneous access to their own health data, and doctors have more time available to see other patients that need more attention. It would seem that time, energy, and money are saved on both the patients’ and doctors’ parts as a result of home-based healthcare. So what are the concerns?
Superficially, for Sense4Baby, there seem to be none. In the case of non-stress testing for pregnant mothers, it may not seem necessary to take out the time and the resources needed to visit a doctor just to measure a fetus’s heart rate and contractions. There is no risk for the mother or baby2, and thus no reason to drive to a doctor’s when the procedure can be done in the privacy and comfort of the home. However, I personally believe that there is something vital lost when cutting out face-to-face time with your doctor, even in this scenario. Patients have emotional needs—statistics show that forming positive relationships and maintaining supportive, encouraging interactions with others, including doctors, have an essential influence on health3. A patient who has private concerns or anxiety about some facet of her pregnancy will not benefit from replacing valuable time with her doctor with technology like Sense4Baby, which only throws numbers and data at her instead of the compassion or reassurance she may need. In fact, Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, DO, asserted in an article titled Technology and the Doctor-Patient Relationship that, “’I don’t believe a computer could do that as well as I can.’”4 The patient as a result may feel that her concerns aren’t top priority, and thus may feel hesitant about bringing them up.
What are the options? Is there a way to bring the doctor into the home as well as health technology? In our Medical Media Arts Lab course, we’ve discussed how video (for example, Skype) can breach the gap we see here, and can still be efficient and save patients’ time. There would be several complexities and issues to work through in terms of implementation, obviously, but maybe AirStrip Technologies should consider incorporating video calling into their smartphone or tablet software, or their web portal, in order to at the very least give mothers an opportunity to get face-to-face time with their doctors. If this happens, it might even induce patients to bring up their concerns instead of merely fading to a name and a medical case behind the data that doctors receive.
Figure 1 Monitoring device for Sense4Baby1
Sources:
1http://mobihealthnews.com/42062/new-fda-clearance-will-bring-sense4baby-into-the-home/#more-42062
2http://americanpregnancy.org/prenatal-testing/non-stress-test/
3http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3150158/
4http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/07/technology-doctor-patient-relationship.html