UNSTRUCTURED
Point of care (POC) devices enable medical interventions, including testing, to be performed near the patient and often by the patient. Some have suggested that this will disrupt medicine from a symptom/diagnosis/treatment endeavour to a monitoring/prediction/prevention exercise. The rate of innovation and discovery in this area is high, with a majority of these devices used for screening. This article reviews the public health benefits of point of care devices in terms of patient engagement, health inequality and health promotion. Low-cost screening clinics that make use of point of care devices ultimately help with reducing health inequality in developing countries and remote areas. The article also outlines the issues hindering the benefits of using POC and further suggests a framework to present and evaluate point of care devices used in the healthcare industry. The scope of this study is limited to medical-grade devices used at home, in clinics, aged care and hospital settings. We argue that having such a framework provides a neutral source of information to evaluate and select POC for various tasks. CONCLUSION
This study briefly reviews the benefits and challenges associated with using emerging point of care devices to achieve public health benefits. Emerging Point of Care devices has the potential to disrupt public health by increasing patient engagement in managing their own conditions, reducing inequalities in access to healthcare caused by geographic or resource factors, the automated detection of undiagnosed conditions, provision of the healthcare system, and the assembly of large datasets that can be analysed to guide public health policy. However, for these public health benefits to be realised, POC devices need to be regulated in a more open and transparent manner. A framework is proposed to provide information in a transparent manner for the comparison, maintenance and best use of POIC devices in order to facilitate the inclusion of these devices in the health care system.