Photo by rosmary via Flickr
Last year we did a series of posts on Electronic Medical Records and Electronic Medicine. One of those articles, “ Electronic Medicine, iPhones and Path-Dependence ” noted the emergence in Electronic Medicine of the iPhone and the Blackberry. We also noted that the iPhone and Blackberry constitute “an advantaged path” (already in the pockets of roughly 64% of doctors, early popularity further attracting skilled labor, financing, and support) and that these platforms might be capable of playing a part in allowing us to avoid building a costly high tech Tower of Babel : offering “flexibility, interoperability, liquidity of information, and the ability to substitute technologies as the need arises.”
We wrote the following:
A Washington Post article, “ New Tool in the MD’s Bag: A Smartphone ,” states that “Nationally, about 64 percent of doctors are now using smartphones, according to a recent report by the market research company Manhattan Research.” Georgetown’s medical school has recently begun requiring them, and Ohio State’s is handing out the iPod Touch (sans phone) to its students. Mike McCarty, the chief network officer at John Hopkins Health Systems, “believes that smartphones will soon assume a permanent place in medicine.”
As such, designers have engineered applications to suit the needs of those doctors. And as a matter of path-dependence, presumably they will continue to do so. WaPo states that “the iTunes app store lists 674 applications related to medicine available.” There are iPhone and Blackberry apps to “pull up instructional diagrams and videos for patients, write electronic prescriptions and check basic information,” “look up drug-to-drug interactions, to view X-rays and MRI scans,” and even determine pill names derived from physical descriptions.
As we posted a while back,
In the words of Dr. Farzad Mostashari, an assistant commissioner in New York City’s health department and head of the much heralded Primary Care Information Project (which is functioning as a sort of I.T. Department for many of the City’s doctors using EMR), “There’s no way small practices can effectively implement electronic health records on their own. This is not the iPhone.”
Later, we noted that in their NEJM article, No Small Change for the Health Information Economy , Kenneth D. Mandl, M.D., M.P.H., and Isaac S. Kohane, M.D., Ph.D. suggest that it should be. That
As do Professors Sharona Hoffman and Andy Podgurski , the authors of “No Small Change…” stress the need for flexibility, interoperability, liquidity of information, and the ability to substitute technologies as the need arises. To do this they propose governmental encouragement of the use of a platform with interoperable applications (blog builders, think: “plug ins” and “widgets”)
similar to the iPhone.
We also noted in that post, “ Electronic Medical Records: It’s Not too Late to Build the Tower on an Interoperable Platform ,” that
Perhaps the good news here is that the relative scarcity of EMR implementation thus far means that we can yet still devise an interoperable system without rendering substantial but incompatible investments obsolete. Which is to say that we are not yet too far down nine different non-intersecting roads and that “a communicative Tower” can still be built, and sustained, on a Platform.
Now, it seems the path is beginning to emerge–and that interoperable system may actually be the iPhone and Blackberry platforms–which, it seems, are already sitting in doctors’ pockets.
And now via email from NursingSchools.net , an interesting list:
It’s amazing how much we use our phones for anything but phone calls. The widespread use of applications, driven by the explosion of iPhone sales, has helped to redefine just what we’re able to do with our phones in all walks of life and work. The medical profession has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of iPhone app development, with life-changing tech showing up in nursing schools and hospitals nationwide. Some gather information from patients in new ways, while others help medical professionals better sort and understand that information. They’re all designed to help those in the medical field do their jobs in revolutionary ways. Here are some of the most forward-thinking and revolutionary iPhone apps out there for doctors and nurses:
Photo by rosmary via Flickr
Last year we did a series of posts on Electronic Medical Records and Electronic Medicine. One of those articles, “ Electronic Medicine, iPhones and Path-Dependence ” noted the emergence in Electronic Medicine of the iPhone and the Blackberry. We also noted that the iPhone and Blackberry constitute “an advantaged path” (already in the pockets of roughly 64% of doctors, early popularity further attracting skilled labor, financing, and support) and that these platforms might be capable of playing a part in allowing us to avoid building a costly high tech Tower of Babel : offering “flexibility, interoperability, liquidity of information, and the ability to substitute technologies as the need arises.”
We wrote the following:
A Washington Post article, “ New Tool in the MD’s Bag: A Smartphone ,” states that “Nationally, about 64 percent of doctors are now using smartphones, according to a recent report by the market research company Manhattan Research.” Georgetown’s medical school has recently begun requiring them, and Ohio State’s is handing out the iPod Touch (sans phone) to its students. Mike McCarty, the chief network officer at John Hopkins Health Systems, “believes that smartphones will soon assume a permanent place in medicine.”
As such, designers have engineered applications to suit the needs of those doctors. And as a matter of path-dependence, presumably they will continue to do so. WaPo states that “the iTunes app store lists 674 applications related to medicine available.” There are iPhone and Blackberry apps to “pull up instructional diagrams and videos for patients, write electronic prescriptions and check basic information,” “look up drug-to-drug interactions, to view X-rays and MRI scans,” and even determine pill names derived from physical descriptions.
As we posted a while back,
Later, we noted that in their NEJM article, No Small Change for the Health Information Economy , Kenneth D. Mandl, M.D., M.P.H., and Isaac S. Kohane, M.D., Ph.D. suggest that it should be. That
similar to the iPhone.
We also noted in that post, “ Electronic Medical Records: It’s Not too Late to Build the Tower on an Interoperable Platform ,” that
Now, it seems the path is beginning to emerge–and that interoperable system may actually be the iPhone and Blackberry platforms–which, it seems, are already sitting in doctors’ pockets.
And now via email from NursingSchools.net , an interesting list:
It’s amazing how much we use our phones for anything but phone calls. The widespread use of applications, driven by the explosion of iPhone sales, has helped to redefine just what we’re able to do with our phones in all walks of life and work. The medical profession has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of iPhone app development, with life-changing tech showing up in nursing schools and hospitals nationwide. Some gather information from patients in new ways, while others help medical professionals better sort and understand that information. They’re all designed to help those in the medical field do their jobs in revolutionary ways. Here are some of the most forward-thinking and revolutionary iPhone apps out there for doctors and nurses: