There are sweeping changes now taking place at the intersection of health care and Silicon Valley. If the first step was the embrace of digital health by big tech companies and the creation of new wearable devices for tracking fitness and health, then the next step could be the creation of a revolutionary new direct-to-consumer health care model. This would take advantage of cheap plastic dongles hooked into your smartphone that offer the type of diagnostic power once reserved for hospital laboratories.

The latest development in this new direct-to-consumer health model is a new breakthrough from a team of biomedical engineering researchers at Columbia University in New York City that makes it possible to test for both HIV and syphilis in 15 minutesafter hooking a plastic dongle into your smartphones headphone jack. You simply insert a pinprick of blood onto a disposable plastic collector, connect the plastic collectorto a microfluidic chipused to analyze the sample and insert the chip with the bloodsampleintothe dongle. Once youve logged into an app, your smartphone can start to determine the presence of HIV or syphilis in your blood and display the results on your smartphones screen 15 minutes later.

More than its ease of use, the cost factor of the dongle is what makes it possible to speculate that this type of smartphone diagnostics could one day lead to a new direct-to-consumer model for health care. The equipment needed to perform a laboratory-quality HIV testcan cost upwards of $18,450 apiece. Contrast that to the cost of a cheap plastic dongle, which costs an estimated $34 to make.That makes it possible to imagine a future where tests are faster, simpler and cheaper than anything available today.

What makes the lab-on-a-smartphone so innovative is that, even though youre significantly reducing cost, youre not sacrificing power. The results delivered by the new device suggest thata full laboratory-quality immunoassay can be run on a smartphone accessory. Moreover, in a small field study in Rwanda, the team of researchers found that patient preference for the dongle was 97 percent compared to laboratory-based tests.

According to Samuel K.Sia, the lead biomedical engineering researcher on the project, there are broad implications for the way we think about health care: Coupling microfluidics with recent advances in consumer electronics can make certain lab-based diagnostics accessible to almost any population with access to smartphones. This kind of capability can transform how health care services are delivered around the world.

And theres plenty more innovation where this came from. This month, 23andMe received FDA approval for the first time ever to market a direct-to-consumer genetic test. Its an important first stepin terms of delivering direct-to-consumer genetic testing, as 23andMe notes: While this authorization is for a single carrier status test only, we are committed to returning health information to our US customers who dont already have this information once more tests have been through this process and we have a more comprehensive product offering. At some point in the future, you could theoreticallyreceive health reports about your childrenby running a series of DNA tests at home.

This lab-on-a-chip innovation fits into a broader trend that has been building momentum for more than five years. Harvard chemist George Whitesides, in a popular TED Talkin 2009, outlined his vision of diagnostics for all, in which the cost of all diagnostics could be brought down to zero by creating a lab the size of a postage stamp. Instead of taking something thats very expensive and trying to bring it down to zero (the $18,000 machine) you can start with something very simple (a cheap plastic dongle) and attempt to build in additional complexity and diagnostic ability.

Interesting things happen when you start thinking in terms of bringing low-cost innovations from the developing world to developed world. Cost constraints become a positive, not a negative. Sias work suggests that similar tests screening for other diseases might be right around the corner. As Sia points out, If you can start to bring core health services to the smartphone beyond just measuringtheheartrate like blood tests then youre going to start seeing a pretty fundamental shift in the health-care system.

Of course, its not certain that all this innovation is going to be coming to market anytime soon. In the United States, for example, there are obvious regulatory hurdles to get new health innovations to market. Just consider how much time and effort 23andMe has spent in getting its genetic tests to market. As a result, health-care dongles will probably be used in the field first for remote and mobile clinics in the developing world, before moving to the developed world.

When it comes to diagnostics, though, zero cost is an admirable goal. Smartphone diagnostics is part of a mind-set shift about the way we offer and receive health care. Smartphones offer power, a simple user interface and mobility, all in the palm of your hand. Now that the average smartphone today has more processing power than NASA had when it put a man on the moon, it could just be a matter of finding the right mix of dongles and letting Moores Law take care of the rest when it comes to testing for disease.

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Innovations: The future of health care is a dongle attached to your smartphone