Vital Signs by Phone, Then, With a Click, a Doctor’s Appointment

If ever an industry were ready for disruption, it is the American health care industry. Americans spend about $7,600 a year per person on health care, one in two adults lives with a chronic disease and the average wait time to see a doctor in a metropolitan area is 20 days. Entrepreneurs have responded by starting health care technology companies that are changing the way we interact with the entire system.

They are also responding to an evolving model of health care, which will ultimately be focused more on outcomes than on services, and to the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records Incentive Program, which, in an effort to improve the coordination of care, gives providers financial incentives to adopt electronic health records and report how they use them. “We are about to see a fundamental transformation in the way care is delivered and the way patients are engaged with that care,” said Frank Moss, head of the New Media Medicine Group at the MIT Media Lab.