Often the worst part of a visit to the doctor isn’t the awkward hospital gown, needle sticks or embarrassing physical exams — it’s the drawn-out wait, camped out in the reception room in the company of sick patients and old magazines.

That realization led Mr. Oks to create Appointment Status, a Web site devoted to improving appointment efficiency and providing patients with information to avoid long waits. Working with three teenagers from Staten Island Technical High School, where he had gone, Mr. Oks aims to make it easier for patients to schedule appointments — and to find out how far behind the doctor may be before settling into a waiting room chair.

It’s one of several innovations meant to help patients. While many digital developments — electronic medical records and mobile medical encyclopedias — have streamlined doctors’ work, new tools for patients are starting to hit cellphones and the Internet offering help in keeping track of medications, recording heart rate and glucose levels and managing personal and family medical history, among other tasks.

Appointment Status is designed to assist patients before they even take a seat in a waiting room — a sore point for many patients, as doctors well know. In a survey conducted by the doctor-review Web site Vitals, patients reported an average wait time of 21 minutes to see a doctor. Mississippi had the longest reported wait time, at just over 25 minutes.

Some patients say that’s about as long a wait as they will tolerate.

“I’m willing to wait to see a doctor for about 20 minutes before I go talk to the receptionist, and after a 45-minute wait, I always leave and reschedule,” said Maureen Green, a journalist from Syracuse. “Everybody’s time is valuable, not just the doctor’s time.”

Developers and entrepreneurs are starting to tap into this frustration, as well as other rifts in doctor-patient relations. Mr. Oks said his next step is a mobile app to inform patients about delays.

Primary care physicians who felt "called" to practice medicine were more likely to be satisfied helping patients with difficult-to-treat conditions such as as nicotine and alcohol addiction as well as obesity, researchers found.

A survey of primary care physicians found that those who were happy with their medical careers were more likely to report "some or a lot" of satisfaction treating nicotine dependence (62%), obesity (57%), and alcoholism (50%), according to Kenneth Rasinski, PhD, of the University of Chicago, and colleagues.

However, primary care professionals who were unhappy in their careers were less likely to be satisfied treating these disorders, especially if they said they held their patients responsible, the authors reported in a research letter in the August 27 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

All three conditions have been shown to respond to treatment by primary care physicians, but research also has suggested that established treatment protocols are rarely used in the primary care setting. "It may be that physicians shy away from addressing these multifaceted, often obdurate conditions because they find that treating them is unsatisfying," the authors stated. They mailed a survey to 1,504 U.S. primary care doctors (general internal medicine, family medicine, or general practice with no secondary specialty) who were 65 years or younger. The survey was conducted from 2009 to 2010 and the overall response rate was 63%.

They found a significant association with personal feelings of practicing medicine as a calling, and personal satisfaction with treating patients with nicotine dependence, (adjusted odds ratio 1.9, 95% CI 1.2 to 2.9), obesity (aOR 1.9, 95% CI 1.2 to 3.0), and alcoholism (aOR 1.6, 95% CI 1.1 to 2.6). Those who said they were dissatisfied with a medical career were significantly less likely to report satisfaction treating nicotine dependence (aOR 0.7) and alcoholism (aOR 0.6).

Similarly, physicians were less inclined to report satisfaction treating patients for alcoholism if they felt patients were "a lot" responsible for their alcoholism -- versus not at all -- at an aOR of 0.3 (95% CI 0.1 to 0.8).

The authors noted that the study was limited by self-report, bias due to nonresponders. Also, a cross-sectional study cannot determine causation, they said. They added that follow-up studies could analyze satisfaction and responsibility measures against implementation of treatment for the three conditions.

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In a survey, 30% of respondents reported that either they or a family member or friend have experienced a medical error such as receiving the wrong medication, dosage or treatment.

In addition, more than one in five respondents reported having been misdiagnosed by their physician and 45% reported having received an incorrect bill from their healthcare provider.

Regardless of whether they reported having experienced a medical error, 73% of respondents said they are concerned about medical errors and 45% reported being "very concerned" about such errors. Women (76%) expressed concern on a greater scale than men (68%), as did respondents ages 35 to 54 (76%) versus those who are younger (66%).

Despite high levels of concern about medical errors, Americans have confidence in technology to help reduce mistakes, according to the survey. The majority, 68%, believe that as the healthcare field continues to adopt new technologies, medical errors likely will decrease.

The survey was conducted on behalf of Wolters Kluwer Health by Ipsos among 1,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 and older. Survey questions focused on uncovering consumer experiences with medical errors, consumer perceptions on why errors occur and patient habits to help prevent errors at the point of care.

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The 5-foot-4-inch, 140-pound “telemedicine” robot is designed to help patients with health emergencies get more rapid treatment from specialists — especially at night, when hospital staff levels are lower.

“Telemedicine is about getting the right expertise to the right place at the right time,” said InTouch chief executive Yulun Wang. “If a patient has a stroke and comes into the emergency room, you better get a stroke neurologist there quickly. Otherwise, through sheer delay, it can be a matter of life or death.”

Called RP-VITA, the robot allows doctors to virtually visit patients in distant locations, carrying on conversations and even taking measurements in real time. Equipped with cameras, microphones, 3-D mapping sensors, a stethoscope, and a video screen “head” that automatically swivels to listen to voices, the robot transmits and receives video, audio, and navigation instructions over a Wi-Fi broadband connection.

Doctors, patients, and hospital staff control the robot with a specialized terminal or via a software application that runs on Apple Inc.’s iPad tablet computer, and talk to one another using a Skype-like video chat displayed on the robot’s main screen.

“I can get data I never had over the phone,” said Dr. Jason Knight, a pediatric emergency care physician at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County in California, who has been testing a prototype of the robot. “There’s never been one time I’ve used it and said, ‘That was a waste of time.’ I always see something I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

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At Games for Health 2012 on Thursday – amid talk of virtual worlds, avatars, Kinect sensors, biomechanics, social media crowdsourcing and exergaming – a policymaker from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT said that gaming is "on the radar of the federal government."

Games for Health, currently in its eighth year, is a different kind of health IT conference. Many speakers kicked off their talks with a slide showing "what I'm playing" – games that ranged from old-school Nintendo titles to mobile apps such as Words with Friends to multiplayer online games to Xbox dancing and kickboxing simulations.

"I play a new game every day – like, as a policy," said Peter Smith, who researches immersive learning technologies at Joint ADL Co-Lab in Orlando.

Erin Poetter, from the ONC's department of Consumer e-Health/Innovations, also spends a lot of time thinking about policy. In her presentation, "Adding Play to Our Toolbox: HHS & Games," she explained how, at ONC, "we see games a part of a larger initiative." With their "miraculous ability to take complex data and make it actionable and meaningful," games are the perfect tool to help ONC expand its focus to engage consumers, said Poetter.

After all, just 10 to 20 percent of health outcomes are determined by what happens in the healthcare system. It's important to do whatever's possible to improve health outside of the doc office walls. "Better engagement in health can make a real difference," she said. "More activated patients achieve better results."

Any tools or technology that could spur that engagement can help. Like games. "It's time that healthcare catch up with the way we live the rest of our lives," said Poetter.

Gaming is big business, after all. Really big: a projected $79 billion in revenues in 2012. With applications affecting everything from health and wellness to rehab and physical therapy, PTSD, stroke rehabilitation, autism and more, there's no reason games shouldn't have a big role to play in health. That's why experts from heavy hitters such as Microsoft and United Health, Yale and UPenn – designers, developers, car providers and more, from as far afield as Glasgow, Vienna and Kyushu – convened in Boston this week.

Games offer a whole lot more value beyond mere entertainment, Poetter pointed out. They can motivate people to overcome challenges; enable them to visualize change and progress; improve self-efficacy through knowledge and goal sharing and facilitate patient/provider communication and interaction. And they can do even more than that. At Games for Health, one session explored how Xbox's Kinect could be be used not just burn calories with its virtual tennis, but be applied to gauging biomechanics and assisting with telesurgery and helping with catatonic schizophrenia. There were talks titled "Prescribing Video Games (Not Medication) for ADHD" and "Evaluating the Ergogenic Impact of Music During Exergaming When Players Are Co-Located."

It all points to an exciting future. But FDA regulations are a wild card.

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