Page 76 - South Mississippi Living - June, 2025

Personalized
Medicine story by Lynn Lofton
We definitely live in a technology world and one of the places it’s making a difference is healthcare. Personalized medicine through telehealth and wearable devices is altering lives.
Telehealth refers to the delivery of healthcare services using telecommunications technology, usually a phone, that became necessary during the COVID pandemic.
“Telehealth services provide a wonderful opportunity
for patients to connect with a healthcare provider from
the comfort of their own homes,” says Anne Musgrove, Memorial Health System vice president of Ambulatory Services. “Patients who have used telehealth services become repeat users, but the local adaptation of the service has been limited as people still often prefer face-to-face visits. If more people tried telehealth services, I suspect it would become much more popular in this area as it is in larger metropolitan areas.”
With transportation sometimes an issue, telehealth allows for remote patient and clinician contact, care, advice, and education, among other services. It encompasses a wide range of services that can be delivered remotely. Patients can use devices to track their health data and transmit it to their providers. Telehealth can provide access to therapists
and other mental health professionals and can be used for consultations with specialists for managing chronic conditions.
Wearable health devices are electronic devices, typically worn on the body, that collect and transmit data related to an individual’s health and fitness. It can be monitors for elderly people living alone that alerts a service when there’s a problem for the wearers or more sophisticated equipment. Examples include fitness trackers, smartwatches, continuous glucose monitors and wearable ECG monitors.
Musgrove, a nurse practitioner with specialized training
and a Master of Science in Nursing, says, “Wearables have become a great tool for patients to monitor their health and share data with their providers in a meaningful way. We
see a lot of smart watches, prescribed cardiac monitoring devices, and most recently, smart rings and mattress devices to monitor sleep activity.”
She goes on to say that since people are data driven, wearables are probably here to stay. “I expect the device
trend to grow as technology advances and the metrics become more meaningful. Smart watches are by far the most popular wearables we see here because they provide health monitoring data along with being a convenient, hands-free way to manage electronic devices and communications.”
76 | June 2025
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