Cell Phone Impact on Your Pain Practice

This article will provide you with information about the emerging cell phone technologies that will impact your pain medicine practice over the next year or so. More and more people rely on their cell phones and have them wherever they go.

People are discontinuing their home phones and are exclusively using their cell phone for most of their communication. The cell phone has become the de facto standard in communication. Go anywhere these days and you will see people on their cell phones talking.

The cell phone has taken many third world countries into the twenty-first century and transformed the way they communicate. According to an U.N. study, there are now over 3.3 billion cell phone subscribers worldwide. There are over 220 millions cell phone users in the U.S. alone. And, believe it or not, we are the second leading country in cell phone usage behind China, which had about one billion subscribers in February of 2008.

Your Cell Phone–Don’t Leave Home without it!

Do you have your cell phone with you today? If not, you are probably lost without it. My cell phone connects me with so many things these days that if I forget it at home, I have to go get it or else feel out of sync over the course of a day.

Cell phones have evolved incredibly over the past 10 years. My first cell phone was a mobile phone that was connected to my car. Then, a couple of years later, I had a mobile phone that I could fit in a bag, but it was big and bulky. Often times, I would lose connections and that was frustrating.

The Evolution of Cell Phone Technology

The first mobile phones were really two way radios that were used by the police, ambulances, and taxicabs. These phones were usually permanently installed in cars. In the 1940’s, Motorola introduced backpack “walkie talkies” that were utilized by the military and other industries.

In 1979, the first generation of commerically available mobile phones were launched in Japan. In 1983, Bell Labs and Motorola both released the first mobile and handheld phones in the U.S. market. These were analog phones having the first-generation cellular technology that used separate frequencies, or "channels", for each conversation. Analog phones had problems with static noise and had no protection from eavesdropping using phone scanning devices. The first consumer mobile phones were car phones, followed a few years later by bulky, portable bag phones.

In the 1990’s, cell phones went digital as second generation phone systems started appearing on the market. Digital phones were characterized by a digital circuit switched transmission and the introduction of fast phone-to-network signaling. As batteries became longer lasting and more lightweight, and as more efficient electronics were developed, cell phones became smaller and easier to carry. This coincided with the higher density cellular networks that have caused the use of cell phones to explode.

As of 2008, carriers in the U.S. are no longer required to support analog mobile phone systems—everything is going “digital.”

Smart Phones

The third generation cell phones, referred to as “smart phones,”are more like miniaturized computers. They are blurring the differences between phones, PDAs, the more robust computers, and even your television. Cell phones can now accommodate 8 Gigabyte memory chips. This was the type of memory reserved for use in computers just a few years ago.

It is amazing what cell phones can do these days. Cell phones now offer, besides communication:

• recording,
• messaging/voice mail,
• music,
• digital pictures,
• videos,
• TV,
• address books,
• calendars,
• navigation/GPS, and
• lots of other features!

Harnessing the power of the cell phone with its communication and ancillary features can have an incredible impact on your practice over the course of the next few years. Understanding this technology is crucial so you can start incorporating this into your practice over the coming year.

Communication in Your Clinic

How many phone calls do you and your office staff make/receive per day? How often does information get lost in translation and goes undocumented? How would you like to automatically send to and receive from your patient:

• Requests and reminders for appointments
• Prescription refill request and confirmation to go to the pharmacy for the refill
• Prescription allergies patients are experiencing which would alert you to prescribe alternatives and notify them when it is ready for their pickup
• Messages that pertain to their care at specific milestones of their care
• Messages sent to a patient’s cell that lists out what they need to be ready for before having a procedure done (for example no food for 12 hours, etc.)
• Feedback from patient on how they felt after a procedure
• Information the patient needs for getting scheduled for diagnostics (MRI, Labs, etc.) with confirmation that the patient has completed that appointment

The development of cell phone applications and possible connections to your computer system is fast becoming a reality and something you will want to take advantage of. Your clinic will need to prepare for this technological shift. How will the information from your cell phones be sent/captured/managed and merged with the information from your other sources (faxes, scanned information, emails, etc.) into your computer system. These issues are starting to get addressed by hardware and software manufacturers.

The most likely software that would have to interface to cell phone messaging would be your Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system for clinical information and your Practice Management system for administrative functions. However, if you have read some of my previous articles, many of you, unfortunately, have made and continue to make mistakes in purchasing non-pain specific EMRs thus making it impossible to tap into such time efficient profit- making technologies that the boom in cell phone usage can offer your clinic.