Smart(phone) Medicine.

A ttending: ‘‘I can’t log inI The image is not loadingI Just tell me what you see.’’ Resident: ‘‘I see a depressed skull fracture, and there is some midline shiftI’’ We have all experienced this situation beforeVit is the middle of the night, an emergent patient arrives, and you, the young resident, need guidance from the attending on call to decide the best course of action and fast. Not only do you need to discuss the case with the senior staff member, but also they must see the relevant imaging to make a critical decision. In the best-case scenario, they are able to access the imaging via the hospital’s home access system within minutes and can tell you how to expeditiously treat the patient, but far worse scenarios can quickly develop. What if there is a technical problem, and the attending cannot access the imaging? What if the expert consultant is abroad and does not have access to the hospital’s network? The possible causes of delays in patient care are endless. Both residents and senior physicians have recognized that communication is both the crux of the problem and the solution. Communication between all levels of hospital staff as well as patients is essential in providing optimal patient care and is a well-recognized challenge. There has been much work focused on improving physician-patient communication, but intrahospital and interhospital communication remains underdeveloped. Communication between health care professionals is a complex issue, where significant advancements in the dialogue can be found in the timely access to imaging. We have seen the progression from physicians requiring actual physical films to intrahospital and later extrahospital digital viewing. One of the benefits of this progression is the reduction in patient complications arising from delays in an access to imaging. It is projected that more than one quarter of the global population will use ‘‘smartphones’’ in 2015, and by 2016, approximately two billion people worldwide will be using smartphones for personal or professional use. Many hospitals are now supplying their staff with smartphones, which can send media via multimedia messaging service (MMS). MMS is an easy and user-friendly mode of instantaneously delivering multimedia among people or groups. For example, the resident can immediately share relevant media with an attending and, if further consultation is needed, can quickly share it with others in any location. The feature of group communication expands the conversation to allow for multiple experts to share their insight and experience and ultimately form a rich and wellconceived treatment plan. Furthermore, group conversation can be forums for brainstorming. For residents, exposure to this didactic dialogue is invaluable for their training. Group communication can also be tailored so that conversations can be among attendings, residents, nursing staff, or any combination of relevant health care providers. The benefits to health care providers from using MMS capabilities to enhance communication are endless, and they all result in dramatically improved quality of care. MMS can act as a source of quick expert backup in one’s pocket enabling real-time multidirectional flow of communication, resulting in effective decision making regarding patient care. The development of an application that could allow health care providers to securely share relevant patient information in the form of images, videos, or even laboratory data all via a smartphone could revolutionize health care. Multidisciplinary group collaboration through these communication channels maintains unprecedented consistency in patient care. Moreover, nightlong group discussions can make morning rounds more purposeful. In addition to the benefits of multiple expert insights in patient diagnosis and treatment, MMS can cut down on many errors that are made because of a delay in communication. Peripherally affiliated hospitals, smaller departments, and facilities with older technology can also benefit from this kind of multimedia communication. Organizing communication as such also ensures that pertinent information can follow a patient transferred between hospitalsVthis information could otherwise be potentially lost because of software incompatibility or other gaps in communication. All of the shared information and decisions developed via MMS can be downloaded and could be embedded in the patient medical record. The benefits discussed here only exhibit a limited scope of how MMS can dramatically improve patient care as well as hospital personnel communication and education. We encourage its consideration as a dramatically improved form of medical communication. Improvement in patient care exists when communication is open, and when communication is open, fewer mistakes are made. Fewer mistakes caused by communication errors or unintentional suboptimal initial treatment plans by incorporating MMS will hopefully result in fewer admission days, which would result in fewer avoidable patient complications and the harsh reality of losing a patient. There is no worse CURRENT OPINION