Is the smartwatch ready for your practice?
Similar to their smartphone counterparts, smartwatch applications allow physicians to view schedules, basic patient information, and communicate with ancillary staff.
Take-home message: Similar to their smartphone counterparts, smartwatch applications allow physicians to view schedules, basic patient information, and communicate with ancillary staff.
Tech Talk
Ophthalmic clinical practice continues to be reshaped by technology. While each advent has provided potential opportunities to simplify the delivery of patient care, new wearable technology may be changing the patient-physician relationship. Is the next wave of wearable technology-smartwatches-ready for your office?
Smartwatches are a particularly high-profile sector in wearable devices. Though much of the attention of smartwatches has focused on data collection of vital patient statistics, they may also be of significant value to the physician’s clinical practice.
‘A tap on the wrist’
Smartwatches can be used, for example, to receive routine as well as urgent notifications. Smartwatches can create a slight pulse on the physician’s wrist when a call or text is received.
This “tap on the wrist” potentially can be used to minimize disruption in patient encounters while still communicating urgent messages between a clinician and ancillary clinical personnel. Though these notifications can also be realized with smartphones, the fact that physicians do not have to pull out their phones to view and respond to messages may make the patient experience less obtrusive.
Recognizing this potential, some electronic health record (EHR) companies (such as EPIC) have started to offer HIPAA-compliant, smartwatch applications. Similar to their smartphone counterparts, these watch apps allow physicians to view schedules, basic patient information, and communicate with ancillary staff.
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