It’s December 20, 2012. I’m in a mad scramble to finish a rewrite of this article by deadline—and before the world ends—but have been suffering from what I’ve self-diagnosed as a sinus infection, due in no small part to the feeling that my head is about to explode. My over-the-counter meds are ineffective, but who has time to make a doctor’s appointment? Certainly not this writer.

Instead of braving the cold and driving myself down to urgent care, I plug my symptoms into a site called Zipnosis, where I plop $25 on my credit card, answer a long series of questions, and am swiftly informed—within the hour—that all I have is an upper respiratory infection. My prescription to Flonase nasal spray is sent to me online, and I simply plug in the pharmacy where I want to pick it up (the Target right by my house), and save about two hours out of the deal.

This is the changing world of healthcare.

“The role of technology and the role of the physician and how those play together is just beginning to start to play out and the reality is that there’s so much power in our hands today that healthcare hasn’t really been able to take advantage of that,” said Zipnosis CEO Jonathan Pearce, who had a clear vision of the convergence of mobile technology and lower cost access to care for very simple medical conditions in the hands of the consumer.

It’s All About Mobile (And Tablets)

While not everyone would prefer to bypass the doctor visit for a virtual timesaving measure, more and more people are using their phones and tablets to access health information.

A recent report by the Pew Research Center, based on a nationwide survey of over 3000 U.S. adults conducted by Princeton Survey Research, showed that of the 85 percent of U.S. adults with cell phones, slightly over half own smartphones. And about half of smartphone users get health information on their phone, often through increasingly popular diet and exercise apps.

The numbers are increasing at rapid clip. According to healthcare market research and advisory firm Manhattan Research, 75 million U.S. adults use mobile phones for health related information, which is up from 61 million in 2011. Tablet use also increased from 15 million users in 2011 to 29 million users in 2012.

“There are converging forces that are going to make consumer-based medicine supported by mobile inevitable,” said Dr. Drew Palin, Medical Innovation Officer at Preventice. These include limited access to physicians and nurses, costs shifting to consumers, and the ubiquity of mobile apps and mobile solutions.

More Awareness, Little Change

Being able to look up virtually any health condition online—on credible yet accessible sites such as WebMD and Healthline—has increased public awareness of health conditions exponentially. So we all have tons of health information and everyone’s meeting all of their goals, right?

Not so fast. Ironically enough, it is the very rise of technology—along with the reduction of physical activity (as tasks become more automated)—that is thought to be linked to the rise of obesity. Projections show that time U.S. adults spend in sedentary behaviors (not including sleeping) will increase to nearly 42 hours a week by 2030. Health care costs are rising, along with childhood obesity, overall obesity, and even premature deaths due to inactivity.

Enter Technology

This area is ripe for tech startups to step in, and RedBrick Health is one of them. The corporate health and wellness provider offers tools and resources for self-insured employers to provide to their workers to help them maintain or improve their health, and provide online support for those suffering from chronic conditions.

“We know from behavioral research that just because you know you should or shouldn’t do something doesn’t mean you actually do it,” said RedBrick Health Marketing Manager Andy Gonerka. “The awareness is there, and now it’s up to organizations and companies to actually act on it and get people to do something about it.”

RedBrick taps into the rising trend of gamification, turning what used to be boring activities into a fun and engaging experience where users can earn points and badges, move up in levels, and have quantifiable data at their fingertips.

Focusing on mobile devices allows users to track their information on the fly, or while standing in line for that cup of coffee, or after they’re leaving the gym instead of having to remember to enter their details into their computers every night.

“It is just a convenience factor of having it be part of your life, not an added task you have to do but suddenly it just becomes a part of everyday life. A lot of the behavioral economists out there will say you know obviously humans are irrational but if you make something simple for them to do they’re much more likely to do it and so I think that’s really where tech. is playing a huge role because it is just simplifying the process of maintaining or adapting healthy habits.” Redbrick saves employers $612 per participant per year, an overall return on investment of 3.8 to 1.

From hardware to software

For various reasons (such as a 2.3% medical excise tax on manufacturers and importers of medical devices in 2013, and increased regulation from the FDA), money has shifted away from medical devices (things like pacemakers and stents) and towards software.

“I think what's more game-changing is that hardware is now being coupled with software at a faster pace than we've ever seen,” said Casey Allen, cofounder of Minnesota-based tech accelerator Project Skyway. “We've reached amazing breakthroughs with hardware, but without a software component, measuring, transmitting and analyzing the data, hardware by its nature gets commodified. We've now turned the corner in making hardware smart, and in the next 10 years, almost all innovation around med device will be the software that's attached to it,” he predicts, adding that “software startups will be available to fill gaps that the incumbents, who by their nature move very slowly, have not yet filled, in ways that are game-changing for the consumer."

Dr. Palin has seen this very shift throughout his career. “When I started out, medicine was extremely physician-centric,” he recalls. “The physician was the demigod and everything circled around him. What happened with the internet and access to information on the web…that began to change because people could look up [information] about the diseases and when they went in to the doctor often they’d know as much or more about the problem because they had done the research, so that shifted the balance of power.” Preventice now allows doctors to prescribe videos for patients to watch, and offer interactive patient education platforms to help people follow their treatment protocols

“To date, most of what we think about health has come to us from a health professional who was told this information from another health professional, who was told this information from another health professional. By putting this power in the hands of individuals, we can now take control of data to be able to know with certainty how certain foods or certain forms of exercise impact our health and well being on an almost real-time basis. One step removed from that, we now have the opportunity to create social graphs around modifying and changing our behavior in new ways, whether its quitting smoking or losing weight, none of which could be possible without data,” Casey Allen explains.

But not all apps are accurate, and some can even be harmful, a report by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting found. Because apps don’t have independent testing or government oversight, it’s up to individuals to validate the claims behind the apps they download. (Faithful subscribers who read my two-part series on reading and evaluating scientific studies, published in our November and December issues, already have a head start.)

"I think that will sort itself out with very little to no harm done to the consumer,” Casey Allen said, so no need to run to the government for permission to download. “I think the worst case scenario is somebody puts faith in a piece of data that may or may not be accurate, but the burden is ultimately on that individual to decide what decisions they could be making. App reviews combined with bloggers with a healthy dose of skeptical users means that very quickly we know which apps provide what value in what ways and in which ways perhaps it is weak."