Should medical professionals get an iPhone, Blackberry, or Android phone? It’s complicated.

How important is security and an “enterprise” ready phone to you?

We’ve mentioned before some of the security issues with the iPhone platform. With the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 software, Apple hopes to address many of these issues, and is promising a more robust enterprise ready platform.

However, Blackberry has dominated the enterprise market, and if you ask most IT managers at your hospital they will tell you they prefer Blackberry due to the greater access to control they have using the Blackberry Enterprise Server. On top of this, the lack of 3rd party medical applications available for the Blackberry can also be seen as a plus for those concerned with hospital IT security. These applications can be a portal to security breaches – not something a hospital system wants to deal with when they have sensitive patient information stored on their servers.

Blackberry also has a fantastic native e-mail client. It can thread together your e-mails, in a similar fashion as G-mail on your desktop browser. Again, Apple promises to deliver this functionality with the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 release this summer, but Blackberry has had it for awhile now.

So if security is of upmost concern to you, you want a mobile phone with a great e-mail client, and you don’t mind a lack of medical applications, then going with a Blackberry would be a good choice here.

I hedge the above by saying patient data shouldn’t be stored on a mobile phone – rather, almost all patient data that is accessed is done via a cloud system – accessed from a secure server. You should be fine using an Android device or iPhone when accessing information via these systems.

Do you use medical reference apps or use a PDA often?

If you use one of those old Palm PDA’s, you could definitely save some pocket space by having a smart phone. Many forget Palm was at the forefront when it came to having medical apps – physicians and medical students loved their Palm PDAs because they could download custom designed medical apps from the internet, upload them onto their PDA, and use them as mobile medical reference tools in practice. I can speak for the medical community at large when I say we’re all hoping Palm makes a comeback under the leadership of their new parent company HP.

Just as Palm was at the forefront of medical apps back in the early 2000s, its clear Apple is taking the lead now. They literally have thousands of more legitimate medical applications than the Android and Blackberry platforms. Apple certainly didn’t create the App Store with the mindset of developing an ecosystem for vibrant medical apps – they didn’t even have a medical apps section on the launch of the App Store.

Rather, the set up of the App Store and the tens of millions of iPhones and iPod Touches sold can be given credit for this huge success. Developers are given a seventy percent cut of the sales of their Apps, and with the huge number of potential customers – one can see the huge incentive to develop quality apps on the iPhone OS platform.

The key difference between the iPhone and Android App eco system is the lack of a streamline operating system on the Android. The Android operating system is severely fragmented, with certain apps only working on certain phones and certain versions of the operating system. Apple has avoided this by having a uniform operating system on their iPhone and iPod Touch. Even the iPad can run apps that are on the iPhone and iPod touch – although not on a full screen.  It’s easy for Apple to do this since they make both the operating system and the actual hardware, while Google(Android) does not.

A developer I recently spoke to who has popular applications on both the Android OS and iPhone OS said the following:

I know what to expect when I develop an app for the iPhone. I know the devices it will run on, and I know I’m instantly reaching millions of customers. With Android, I don’t know how my applications will run on all the different types of phones, and I know my some of my applications won’t run on the older versions of the software. When Android updates its operating system again, there is a good chance my applications won’t run on the newer phones. So when it comes to spending time developing applications, it makes financial sense to focus on the iPhone.

Just look at our top 10 list of free medical apps on the iPhone verse the top 5 list of free medical apps on the Android. We struggled to find quality free applications on the Android. We set out to find 10 free medical apps for the Android, but had to stop at 5 because of the lack of quality free apps.

Granted, you can access Epocrates, Skyscape and other large medical reference companies on your Android and Blackberry, but if you look at our top 10 list of free medical apps for the iPhone, you’ll find extremely useful apps that are almost all only available on the iPhone, such as iRadiology. Even with Epocrates, only recently did they come out with a free version for the Android – and they still don’t have premium versions of Epocrates available for the Android! Further showing the issues the Android platform presents for medical developers.

So if you want a smartphone that delivers quality medical apps, then the iPhone is clearly your best bet. Notice how Blackberry wasn’t even mentioned here – if you ask developers they will tell you Blackberry doesn’t make it easy for them to develop apps for their phones, plus their user interface isn’t as dynamic as the iPhone or Android operating systems.

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