The New Health Dialogue

Apple technology brings to mind sleek, hip devices, maybe a miniature music player or a laptop thinner than your hand. Medical technology conjures up thoughts of scary-looking big imaging machines, or maybe computerized health records.

What happens when you put the two together? No, not an MRI machine that plays Johnny Nash. When the iPhone G3 is released tomorrow, it will be paired up with some new medical applications (developed by independent companies) that will put new technologies literally at a doctor's fingertips. Here's a sneak peek at how three widely publicized programs could help improve the quality of care.

1. Reduce Adverse Drug Effects. Epocrates has been around for a while making clinical reference tools for PDAs and Smartphones, complete with alerts about dangerous drug interactions. The transition to the iPhone brings a slew of new features. The iPhone’s bright colored screen makes it easy to view not just drug information, but also pictures of the pills—and a great new tool: the “Drug Identifier.” Say a patient comes in and says, “ I’m taking a purple three-sided pill, but I don’t know what it’s called." This feature lets the doctor search for images of three-sided purple pills, see what they are prescribed for, show it to the patient, and figure out what he is taking, why he's taking it, and how it interacts with other prescriptions. In a fragmented health care system where patients may see several specialists who don't communicate all that well, this information could go a long way toward preventing unintentional and unknown adverse drug interactions, and even giving a more complete picture of the patient's overall condition. Epocrates was featured at the launch of iPhone 2.0, see a demo here.
2. Train New Doctors. Remember those multiplication flash cards from third grade? Well, now we have an iPhone anatomy equivalent. The Modality programs take Netter’s Anatomy flashcards, turns them electronic and adds a quiz mode where doctors in training are challenged to identify structures. It even links to outside web resources (handy if you still have your fibia and tibia confused). Modality was featured at the 2008 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. See a demo here.
3. Mobile Medical Imaging. MIMVista takes the medical imaging away from those big scary machines and into the hands of physicians, and maybe even patients. The program uses medical images like a meteorologist uses a weather map. It overlays metabolic information (PET scan) over structural information (CT or MRI scans) and its mobility allows the doctor to share the images with the patient. The program also creates a 3-D reconstruction of the body, and the iPhone’s touch screen allows the doctor to investigate the image easily and quickly. Additionally, the program makes it easy to send images to other physicians for remote consultations. MIMVista was featured at the 2008 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, watch the video (very, very cool):
   
    

As we’ve heard from many experts, health IT alone is not a panacea for the health care system, and the iPhone alone certainly won’t fix everything. But innovations like these indicate that the private sector is roaring to go on health IT,and there's got to be tons of really creative stuff being developed that we haven't heard about yet. With a little help from the government, (Congress is working on health IT legislation, HHS is still developing national policies) user-friendly health information technologies could vastly improve the quality of patient care…plus, who wouldn’t want a cool new toy?