At a recent Health Enterprises Network event, Interapt CEO Ankur Gopal demonstrated how wearable technology like Google Glass, combined with mobile apps like Scribblit, will create a new way to deliver high-quality healthcare to remote and rural areas of the world.

The demonstration was part of HEN’s “mHealth: Mobilizing the Community” event that focused on bringing leaders in Louisville’s healthcare community together to discuss next steps towards engaging consumers and lowering healthcare costs for everyone by managing and maintaining personal health records on mobile devices.  Gopal joined the event’s accomplished panel of healthcare and data science experts to give a glimpse of “what’s next” in healthcare, showing how the doctor-patient encounters we know today will evolve into remote telehealth in the near future.

Gopal’s demonstration consisted of him acting as a physician who sits in a “cockpit” looking at three screens: The first would be a live-stream from a nurse wearing Google Glass; the second would be a Scribblit messaging dashboard for communication with other physicians; and the third screen would show the patient’s Electronic Health Record (EHR).  Gopal watches and communicates with a nurse via their Glass livestream while they examine the patient; then Gopal uses Scribblit, a HIPAA-compliant messaging app for mobile devices, to ping another expert and ask them about a particular injury for advice on next steps in treatment; then Gopal logs the entire encounter in the patient’s EHR instantly.

“Very soon, it will be common for doctors and nurses to put a device like Google Glass in their bags, along with the usual stethoscope, scrubs, and badge, and take that into work for treating patients,” says Gopal.  “This isn’t science fiction, or what we hope will happen eventually–all of the necessary technical elements needed to make this kind of doctor-patient encounter feasible already exist; now for companies like Interapt, it’s simply a matter of helping healthcare providers understand the best ways to move forward and roadmap the adoption of this kind of mobile and wearable health technology into their current strategy.”

You can learn more about Scribblit by watching the video below: