Are you, or is someone on your staff, good at texting or txting, as it were? How smart, really, is your smart phone?

Frivolous questions? Not at all according to a new study from the journal Pediatrics and one of the latest projects from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Physicians at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, like all physicians, are concerned about (and would like to improve) their patients' compliance in terms of taking their medications. It becomes more vital when the topic is keeping a transplanted liver healthy, for instance.

According to the results of a study published in Pediatrics, when patients received txt messages on their cell phones from their providers, there was “significant improvement in medication adherence and a reduction in rejection episodes” in recipients of liver transplants. The median age of the study participants was 15.

While the objective in this study was to “improve immunosuppressant adherence for pediatric patients with orthotopic liver transplants,” the possibilities of reaching patients directly and personally are by no means limited to transplant patients.

The lead author in the study is Tamir Miloh, MD, from the Department of Pediatrics and the Recanati Miller Transplant Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital.

Please Cough Into Your Phone
And on the topic of uses of cell phones, imagine this: you get a call from a patient who has a respiratory condition, maybe it's pneumonia, maybe not. Should this patient come in to the office? Wouldn’t it be great if you could limit the exposure of your other patients and staff to what might be an infectious condition?

What if, instead of saying, ‘sure, come on down,’ you ask the patient to cough into the cell phone, which then gives you information about whether the cough is likely from a viral infection or bacterial in origin. Is it a wet cough? A dry one? Mucous?

A research group called STAR Analytical Services is working to create a program that would compare the cough with a pre-recorded database of coughs from people with various respiratory diseases. The database would contain cough recordings from people of different ages, genders, weights and other variables.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is providing financial support for the research.