Health care is migrating from the bricks-and-mortar doctors office or care clinic to the person him or herself at home and on-the-gowhere people live, work, play, and pray. As people take on more do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches to everyday lifeinvesting money on financial services websites, booking airline tickets and hotel rooms online, and securing dinner reservations via OpenTablemany also ask why they cant have more convenient access to health care, like emailing doctors and looking into lab test results in digital personal health records.

85% of U.S. health consumers say that email, text messages, and voicemail are at least as helpful as in-person or phone conversations with health providers, according to the Healthy World study,Technology Beyond the Exam Room by TeleVox. Furthermore, one in three consumers admits to being more honest when talking about medical needs via automated voice response systems, emails, or texts than face-to-face with a health provider.

And three in ten consumers believe that receiving digital health care communications from providerssuch as texts, voicemail, or emailwould build trust with their providers. Half of people also say theyd feel more valued as a patient via digital health communications. When people look to engage in health with an organization, the most important enabling factors are trust and authenticity.

All consumers, from Gen X and Gen Y to Baby Boomers, welcome the era of personalized medicine via digital communications, looking for these messages to be personally tailored. That 1 in 2 consumers (49%) say theyre open to receiving medical care between visits via email testifies to consumers demand for telehealth services.

Figure 1 reveals the popularity of email among patients for their interactions with the medical establishment, and other media show up strong as well.

Figure 1. Relative popularity of various channels for doctor/patient communication

Most consumers spend time throughout the year seeking health information onlineabout an hour a week on average. Time with a doctor? An hour a year. That 52:1 ratio of hours spent on health, outside versus inside the doctors office, raises the question: what can the health care field do in the interstices of time to enhance peoples health and experience with the health care system?

The answer is in the cloud and mobile technology platforms, combined with the already-well-used Internet. People have been maturing in their use of the Internet for health, with about 1 in 3 people moving beyond Web 1.0 into Health 2.0s era of blogs, wikis, and social networks ofpeer-to-peer support, theWisdom of Patientskicking in. AHarris poll found that at least one-third of peoplewho participate in online activities are keen to use smartphones or tablets to do health online: to ask doctors questions, make appointments, and receive medical test results, for example.

Clinical Management Apps: Creating Partnerships Between Providers and Patients, fromThe Commonwealth Fund, posits that apps can help to transform health care delivery across all populationseven hard-to-reach lower-income people who often fall through both the health care safety net and the digital divide. The authors of the report look into the 40-60,000 health and wellness apps in the market, and believe that these may be beneficial for low-income and minority patients disproportionately affected by chronic disease. Because these people often face barriers to accessing health care, self-managed apps when adopted and used can address this challenge. The researchers point to data from thePew Internet & American Life Projectshowing that African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely than white people to own a smartphone and that among cell phone owners, minorities are also more likely to use their phones for accessing health information.

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Changes in the health care system driven by self-service and DIY health