What Medtech Can Learn from Google Maps

Developers of medical technology should study how GPS continues to disrupt how people navigate from point A to point B, said Alan Greene, MD, chief medical officer of Scanadu (Moffett Field, CA) at BIOMEDevice San Jose.

Google Maps is already in its ninth iteration, giving users turn-by-turn navigation instructions with a bevy of contextualized information. For instance, it can show live traffic information, calculate how much an Uber ride will cost, or inform users of transit schedule changes.

Meanwhile, much of medical practice is stuck at the MapQuest stage, Greene said, where patients are given, for instance, context-less paper printouts of lab results. “My wife recently wife had a concussion and received a printout that said: ‘head injury, adult,’” he explained.

This reminds one of the not-too-distant era when people used Mapquest to calculate the shortest route to their destination, and then printed out the map to take with them.

But patients need the equivalent of turn-by-turn directions to help them know how to best overcome what ails them. “Healthcare is essentially a navigation problem,” Greene said. “What we want to know is: where we are, where we want to get, and the best route with turn-by-turn support.”

Greene said that at present, a substantial portion of medical practice is frozen at a stage earlier than the Mapquest stage: the paper map stage.

“When I was a kid, and my family was going on a trip, they would go to the AAA office and the people in the office would take a paper map and highlight the route on it. And that was a big advance at the time,” Greene noted.

And then the first portable GPS debuted, and as the costs of the systems came down, they became a mainstream item. Now, GPS technology is everywhere, and people now routinely use their smartphone to help them navigate: whether they are on foot in a city not well known to them or in their car.

Similarly, healthcare technology will be increasingly embedded in patients’ lives in years to come. “I have two major predictions of where healthcare is headed: the idea of diagnosis will not just happen at the doctor’s office. It will happen by analyzing data at home,” Greene said. “The doctor’s visit will no longer be the centerpiece of patient care. It is equivalent to the AAA office.”