It’s fair to say almost everyone has bought at least one accessory for their iPhone.  My own collection consists of two items, a simple protective case, and protective case with a built in battery.  I can’t emphasize how crucial my battery case has been, especially when I hit the 20th hour of a 30 hour on call shift and my iPhone’s native battery is about to die.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the development of iPad accessories, and how companies such as Griffin, Gelaskins, Sanho, and others are scrambling to manufacture products as fast as possible.  Time is money in the accessory business, and the iPod/iPhone accessory business is big money — totaling 3.7 billion in 2009 alone.

Medical app developers have already mentioned how they will be customizing their products for the iPad.  Epocrates and Macpractice are examples of two significant players who have already committed to the iPad platform — and there are more.

With that said, there’s no doubt some health care professionals will be using an iPad, whether for reading medical books or for EMR purposes.  So then two key questions come to mind: What accessories do we want to see and whats already out there?  The following are 5 key accessories:

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We are excited to announce that the iMedicalApps team will be covering HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia next week. HIMSS – Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society – is one of the premier healthcare IT organizations and there conference is a perennial highlight of the HIT community.

The iMedicalApps team will be covering the exhibition floor where vendors ranging from Epic Systems and MacPractice – both EMR vendors with iPhone/iPad interfaces – to Philips and Northrop Grunman, who bring an incredibly diverse array of healthcare IT services to the market.

In addition, we will be interviewing a number of executives from a variety of firms. We will bring you the latest news from the healthcare IT world, with a focus on innovations in applications for mobile platforms. If you have any particular vendors you’d like to know more about, please let us know and we’ll do our best to fit it in.

Health care professionals have been patiently waiting for the expansion of the Android universe to hit the world of medical apps.  With the exception of Unbound Medicine – who have done a very nice job in rolling their products into the Android Market – users of Android mobile devices have thus far been relegated mostly to the world of medical calculators and dictionaries. For Android owners, the release of Epocrates could not have come sooner. If you are in the field of medicine, you are probably familiar with Epocrates.  We reviewed Epocrates on the iPhone before.  And for health care professionals and students, Epocrates, honestly, needs no introduction.  From the short-white-coat student to the tech-savvy clinician, Epocrates has, for years, been an essential tool in refreshing those synapses you made in pharmacology class (or didn’t make). The field of pharmacology is ever changing.  Epocrates helps many of us stay on top of it all, and improve care for patients.

Keep in mind, the version of Epocrates Rx currently available and reviewed here is still in BETA.  So many of the richer features available on other platforms are still missing for Android. Also, one of the difficulties in reviewing any app for Android is the potential for variability in user experience between OS versions, and from phone to phone.  This review is based on the HTC MyTouch, which runs on Android OS v1.6.

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Emergency rooms are notorious for their long waiting times – that’s pretty common knowledge. But now the Hospitals of Central Connecticut are looking to a new medical app for the iPhone to help improve their emergency room wait times. Having spent a fair amount of time recently working in an emergency room, I (and probably everyone with similar experiences) can assure you that no one – physicians, nurses, administrators – want it to be that way. Much effort has been made in improving patient triage, workflow management, and other areas of opportunity that could increase the efficiency with which a patient is managed when they get to the emergency room. Some emergency rooms, like Hospital of Central Connecticut, are now looking to improve efficiency even before the patient arrives at the emergency room. The New Britain Herald reports that a new medical app released for the iPhone this week allows patients to view waiting times for the emergency rooms at two local hospitals in the hopes that patients with non-emergent complaints will head to the less crowded ER.

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Whether diagnosing a heart defect in a newborn or discovering a life-threatening rumble in a elderly man’s abdomen, I think all clinicians can relate to that surge of excitement we feel when we discover something that we could use to help a patient. But as I’ve progressed through my training, I’ve also observed how these findings inevitably lead to confirmatory tests – echocardiograms, ultrasounds, and so on. Our clinical acumen is simply not good enough. I’ve often heard the argument that, for this reason, the stethoscope is an outdated tool. Perhaps it almost was. Companies like Thinklabs, however, feel very differently and are reinventing the stethoscope to meet the needs of modern medicine. Meet Thinklabs’ ds32a digital stethoscope with the Stethoscope Medical App for the iPhone. Together, they not only improve the clinician’s ability to hear sounds, but also to review and share the audio and waveforms – all on the iPhone.

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