Medical Uses of the iPhone
Friday, June 29, 2007
Joshua Schwimmer, MD, FACP, FASN
As I was walking to the dialysis unit today, I couldn't help thinking about the iPhone -- mostly because I had to walk through a crowd of people who were waiting outside an AT&T store to buy one.The iPhone (in case you haven't watched any media for the last three months) is Apple's new phone, combining a video iPod, a touch screen phone, and an internet device with several other "breakthrough" features.
That's all well and good -- but how might the iPhone be helpful to doctors and patients?
MedGadget, back in January, had this to say:
Apple's iPhone has got a lot of people excited... including the Medgadget crew. Why? Well, among its other uses, it's a powerful medical device. For instance, you can use the iPhone to:A portable device for watching medical videocasts and listening to podcasts would be helpful for medical education and displaying medical information for patients, but as MedGadget points out, you don't need an iPhone to do that -- you could use a regular video iPod.
1. Watch medical podcasts [or videocasts; see an intro to medical podcasts here]
2. Dial 911
Sure, you could always do this before on a separate iPod and cell phone, but convergence is key. Later this year, we expect to hear about the first patients that diagnosed their MI via medical videos watched on their iPhone, and were able to alert EMS with the very same device.
Then, hopefully, Steve Jobs will add a defibrillator to the second-generation iPhone...
One way to really leverage the special nature of the iPhone would be to use its integrated YouTube player. There's an increasingly large amount of medical education videos on YouTube -- for example, clinicalcases.org reviews pathology cases and echocardiogram teaching cases. There are many videos designed for patients as well.
Imagine a patient-physician encounter where the doctor pulled out an iPhone and punched up a video on YouTube that explained the patient's medical condition or the procedure about to be performed.
Or a physiology discussion where a process was illustrated by someone's iPhone playing a computer generated image like those seen in The Inner Life of the Cell.
If you have any more ideas for using the iPhone, please feel free to comment.
(I've posted a longer discussion on using the iPhone to improve productivity on The Efficient MD.)
7 Comments:
At Sat Jun 30, 06:36:00 AM 2007,
John said…
If Apple and ICD manufactures collaborate, then perhaps iPhones (with an accessory) could interrogate and transmit data for ICDs.
At Mon Jul 09, 02:21:00 PM 2007,
Jerry Rickter said…
Unbound Medicine now has a nice iPhone interface to drug, disease, and test information plus access to Medline. A live demo is available.
The interface is pretty slick for a browser implementation, though some would probably prefer a custom software program with the information resident on the device. Too bad Apple doesn't allow that now.
At Thu Jul 12, 03:05:00 PM 2007,
healthtech said…
i think the real value of the iphone in a medical context is NOT its ability to play videos or act as a phone, but to run applications. in essence, it would be replacing a tablet pc for recording medical encounters. does the browser have full support for https? I imagine it would and IIRC apple opened up the api so 3rd parties can write apps for the phone; being able to interface with an EHR makes the iphone a powerful tool.
At Fri Jul 20, 11:16:00 AM 2007,
Ash Dhar said…
I think one of the best uses for Ipod would be an extended Personal Health record repository.
You can carry a Personal health record(PHR) on just a memory stick and define the levels of encryption- general info available to everyone and then layers of password protected access
So then what would ipod have in addition.You could a/v content added to the PHR like the diagnostic studies, images and other other items of a healthcare history on an IPOD.
Thus you have a complete "real" personal health record which can be accessed by your care provider at the point of care anywhere.
Consider this advantage for an international business traveller-well this could be huge.
With the interoperability standards like CCR and IHE being already on the forefront this would be one of the important uses of ipod in healthcare.
Ash
At Fri Jul 20, 11:18:00 AM 2007,
ORZUV said…
I think one of the best uses for Ipod would be an extended Personal Health record repository.
You can carry a Personal health record(PHR) on just a memory stick and define the levels of encryption- general info available to everyone and then layers of password protected access
So then what would ipod have in addition.You could a/v content added to the PHR like the diagnostic studies, images and other other items of a healthcare history on an IPOD.
Thus you have a complete "real" personal health record which can be accessed by your care provider at the point of care anywhere.
Consider this advantage for an international business traveller-well this could be huge.
With the interoperability standards like CCR and IHE being already on the forefront this would be one of the important uses of ipod in healthcare.
Ash
At Thu Sep 20, 08:52:00 AM 2007,
Anonymous said…
In July, Heart Imaging Technologies, LLC introduced a solution that allows for medical images to be viewed on an Apple iPhone.
See examples at http://www.heartit.com/index.html
Physicians would click on a web link sent via email, enter their password, and, view movies of a patient’s beating heart. They can even put their colleagues on speakerphone for a medical consult while simultaneously browsing through the imaging results.
At Mon May 26, 12:28:00 PM 2008,
Anonymous said…
The best use of the iphone would be to run an application that acually solves a problem. The iphone is a computer, why not run an expert system? I would like to see this site converted to the iphone: www.freeMD.com
A doctor in my pocket.....now that would be cool (and useful)
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