Go out to lunch and take a picture of your food. Send the image to an online journal and repeat at every meal for the next few weeks. If you have signed up for a service called myFoodPhone, a personal dietician will soon be analyzing your hamburgers and milkshakes, telling you how to get more fiber or protein into your diet.

Josée Morin, CEO of Myca, the company behind myFoodPhone, says mobility is essential for making remote doctor-patient consultation services accessible.  “We are changing the way healthcare is being provided,” Morin says.

The use of mobile technology in the healthcare industry is rapidly growing. A study from the Diffusion Group, cited on FierceHealthcare.com, reports that the proportion of US physicians using internet-enabled smartphones is expected to increase from 49 percent in 2006 to 70 percent in 2011. Support for mobile e-health applications is also growing. Healthcare IT News reports that the US government recently invested USD 128 million in rural telemedicine alone.

Using the myFoodPhone service, clients use their cameraphone to take pictures of the food they are eating then send them off to an online journal. Qualified dieticians then view the client’s journal and give them advice in the form of online video and chat messages.

Customers register on the myFoodPhone website and pay a subscription of USD 9.95 per month, which includes two consultations. Sprint mobile subscribers can sign up for the service directly over their phone, and the fee shows up on their phone bill.

Morin says several thousand clients have signed up for the service since its launch 18 months ago and, on average, remain customers for about six months.

Sebastien Tanguay, vice president at Myca, says that most of the service’s features can be used over the mobile phone, including the personalized food journal and the ‘Dashboard’ – a graphical representation of the recommended servings per day.

In September 2007, the company launched Myca Nutrition, a service delivered in cooperation with 14 affiliated dietitians in Canada. “It is now up to registered dietitians to decide what types of services they offer through our technology,” Morin says.

“We all know that healthcare has to change, and there is no doubt that healthcare will be provided this way. Mobile medical consultation will play a role in changing the delivery of service and will put the consumer back in the center of the healthcare model,” Morin says.

by David Francisco