Apple
5 Reasons Why Health Information Technology Needs an Apple Inc.
By: David Ahn, MD
Health care workers throughout the country daily face the growing pains of the transition from paper charts to electronic medical systems. Not only are there frustrations within each system, every hospital seems to have selected a different EMR.  When I was a medical student at UCSD, I was exposed to 4 separate EMR’s (Epic, PCIS, CPRS, Centricity, etc) during my rotations at various San Diego hospitals.
In this Wild West era of electronic health systems, here are 5 reasons how the health care field could benefit if a company followed Apple’s Paradigm.
Blio Reader is poised to be the e-book of choice for medical textbook publishers – Part 2
In part one of this series, we reviewed the Blio business model and how Blio has strategically catered to the needs of book publishers as well as readers. In this post, we will review what we know about the technology and functionality of Blio Reader and how it might enhance digital textbooks to move closer towards their potential as a interactive teaching tools.
Excerpt from part 1 of this series:
Blio reader is a fascinating digital publication platform which appears poised to grow rapidly across multiple devices. Since medical textbooks are such a prime target for digital publishing, one can almost guarantee that Blio reader will be how a significant proportion of tomorrow’s medical students and health professionals will be reading.
Google’s Android OS strategy is following Microsoft’s lead – not Apple’s
We’re giving away 5 promo codes for one of the most popular PDF readers in the App Store via the comments section of this post. Â We’ve reviewed it on this site before and now the app is boasting some significant upgrades.
There were fireworks at the recent Google developer conference (“Google I/O”). Some of this was well deserved excitement around features found in the newest version of the Android mobile operating system (version 2.2, “Froyo”). Much of the fireworks, however, were due to loud, public taunting of the iPhone and Steve Jobs by senior Google executives.
Since everybody loves a contest, these statements by Google speakers were widely covered in the tech press and predictably stirred up heated comment threads throughout the blogosphere.
In truth, the schoolyard level of the rhetoric (see Kara Swisher) probably does not serve Google’s interests in the long run. This is because Google’s business relationships are symbiotic: Google needs its partners’ trust to continue delivering to Google, via their devices and services, massive amounts of user data for its primary business, which is selling advertising.
Why Malpractice Lawyers Could Be Knocking on The Door of the Medical App World – A Big Danger for the Small Developer
Medical practice is a big business. Conservative estimates put the total cost of medical malpractice at nearly $35 billion annually and, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report, nearly $5 billion is paid in claims each year. With an average claims payment of about $300,000 and up to 50% of that going to the lawyers representing the patient, its not surprising that practically every show on cable television has at least one advertisement imploring patients who have suffered practically any bad outcome to contact a lawyer immediately for “the compensation they deserve.”
And its that aggressive pursuit of legal cases that suggests that malpractice lawyers would be receptive to new opportunities for revenue, such as in the area of emerging medical technologies. We’ve talked previously about issues of liability and electronic health record developers. And at least one recent report suggests that iPhone medical app developers, including electronic health record developers producing iPhone interfaces, should be wary that they could become potential targets.
Will Healthcare Providers Shun or Embrace the iPad – Conflicting Surveys Send Mixed Messages [Updated]
Updated! This post has been updated below to include comments from the folks at Epocrates
The excitement and hype surrounding the announcement of Apple’s iPad have subsided for the time being, perhaps just a lull prior to the actual release in a few months. Here at iMedicalApps, we were certainly among the many believers and expected that the iPad could make significant contributions to healthcare, such as potentially replacing the physician’s clipboard or medical textbooks.
However, we did disagree at times on the extent to which the iPad could penetrate the healthcare market, for a variety of reasons. The folks over at Software Advice decided to try to get a feel for what the community at large was thinking through an interesting survey they performed. And for Apple, the results of this survey aren’t encouraging – if you believe the results.
Having spent nearly four years learning how to read medical literature, I decided to try to get a better sense of just how valid these results are especially considering the seemingly conflicting results of the Epocrates survey. Chris Thorman, who authored the article on the survey, was kind enough to correspond with me on details of the survey methodology. Here’s a look at the results and our take on what they really mean.
Social Textbooks and the iPad – How the Medical Community Could Benefit from Dynamic E-books
It’s probably not an exaggeration to predict medical students of the next decade will not lift a physical textbook. In fact, even ownership of a discrete entity, formerly referred to as a “textbook’, may be a historical footnote. Instead, students may simply rent the chapters they need for a particular course, paying a recurring subscription fee to the publisher for the period of usage. This system could foster innovation and allow for dynamic ebooks that change with standard of care, as I’ll discuss in this post.
AT&T’s Strained 3G Network, If not Improved, Will Limit the iPad’s Opportunities in the Medical Community – FCC voices concerns
When I was handed my first pager, I was stunned. It looked like the beeper that Will Smith used to flash on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air (and not even the later seasons, I’m talking about the early, crazy outfit seasons!). So I asked why I couldn’t simply use my phone or, for that matter, why we didn’t all use phones. The answer was simple – reliability. The paging system, of which this rather archaic looking item was part, was very reliable. But was that enough? No. The hospital also maintains it overhead paging system just in case. And if that goes down – yep, there’s a back up there too. In health information technology, reliability is everything. And for the iPad, that could prove to be a major barrier to adoption in the medical community as it faces off with other medical tablets, at least if the FCC’s recently voiced concerns prove to be true.
Motion Computing – One of the iPad’s Competitors in the Medical Tablet World
When I first entered the clinical world, physician order entry and electronic medical records were just concepts to me. As I learned how to navigate the hospital, diagnose everything from the mundane to the incredibly rare (my first patient was a baby with an idiopathic subdural venous thrombosis), and figure out how to treat the sick, I also had to learn how to use those two systems as a prerequisite to doing everything else. The four hours of class didn’t seem to cut it, so I probably spent at least a month trying to get my bearings on how to manage these IT systems. So for anyone who is already familiar with some form of healthcare technology, in this case a tablet, I suspect the adoption cost is far higher than just the price tag. You may be surprised how highly some medical students and residents weigh the notion of learning a new system in their career decisions. And because of what seems to be a particularly high barrier to adopting new information technology in healthcare, anyone interested in whether the iPad will succeed in healthcare should first ask who the competition is.
Apple or Google? The Answer is Both – What the Future Holds for their Competing Mobile Platforms
Over the last few months, a great deal of time has been expended on the “hot competition” between Apple and Google in relation to smart phones. Much of this interest probably had to do with a partially imagined story of a once close friendship between Apple and Google, founded on their mutual enmity of Microsoft, now fractured on the rocks of competition and greed. While the truth probably isn’t as dramatic, whatever conflict exists is much less interesting than where they may overlap – especially when imagining where medical technology could go and how it would affect medical professionals. As most readers are undoubtedly aware, much of the recent discussion in the blogosphere on this topic (at least before January 27) was about the rapid ascent of the Android platform. The emergent themes were that the open and mutable nature of the Android operating system, the entry of multiple handset makers, and the absence of any restriction on software publishing will inevitably make Android the dominant smart phone platform of the future. The historical analogy given was desktop computing, where commodity hardware and a minimally restrictive operating system made Microsoft Windows the de facto standard, despite many obvious flaws. But, it seems this analogy is flawed and here’s why.
