BPH laboratories: A proof-of-concept case on integrating smartphone diagnostics into clinical systems

Smartphones offer the potential to improve and streamline the clinical workflow dramatically besides promising to heighten the safety and quality of healthcare services delivery among care providers in various health organizational systems. Today, the key features of Smartphones that make them compelling for health care include their availability and accessibility (mobility), affordability, and usability including, but not limited to, high processing power, embedded sensors, build-in camera, communication capabilities and ease of use. Together, these desirable characteristics and high-performance computing features also allow smartphones to operate several sophisticated medical applications such as point-of-care diagnostics. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept case demonstration on how a smartphone medical application may be used to acquire, analyze, and transmit clinical laboratory data from a hospital pre-surgical ward to its laboratory information system. The mhealth trial discussed here provided supporting evidence on how a smartphone can be conveniently used to read a lateral flow pregnancy test for a pre-surgical ward with the clinical diagnostic data from the phone transmitted in real-time to the electronic health records. The paper focuses on how such an mhealth solution can be used to make data available for decision making in real-time vis-à-vis the FDA mhealth regulatory policy while improving patient safety and care effectiveness.