Tapping a Physician's Digital Reference

Dan Diamond is a family practitioner who works at the 3D camera Clinic in Silverdale, Wash., not far from Seattle. If he forgets his stethoscope when heading to work, he won't go back home for it, since he can borrow another at the practice. Not so Dr. Diamond's iPhone. "If I leave my iPhone at home, I will turn around and go back for it," he says. "It's that important."
Apple's (AAPL) iPhone has become a critical tool for saving time and improving the quality of the care Diamond provides, particularly when he's with patients, he says. Of 22 applications Diamond has installed on his iPhone, 10 are health related. The most important, he says, is Epocrates Essentials, which lets him quickly check for drug interactions, look up disease symptoms, and find out what lab tests he might need to order. "I don't have everything I need to know memorized," Diamond says. "This makes me look like I do." Epocrates Essentials is one of at least 278 downloadable tools in the "medical" section of Apple's iTunes App Store, a compendium of more than 15,000 games, tools, and other applications available for use on the iPhone.
A $17 Billion Medical Modernization
Diamond's deepening dependence on health-related mobile apps underscores the potential that the iPhone and other Web-enabled wireless handsets can play in overhauling the way physicians and hospitals dispense heath care. "The lead application is for doctors to look up information so they can be up-to-date with the latest [Food & Drug Administration] warnings and new drugs to help them write prescriptions," says Harry Wang, director of health and mobile research at Parks Associates in Dallas. "But in the future you'll see devices like the iPhone be a portal to a lot more medical information like patient records and lab results. They'll eventually be writing prescriptions directly from their phones." and convenient access to digital health records is likely to take on added importance as the Obama Administration doles out $17 billion in economic stimulus spending with an eye to modernizing the U.S. health-care system and pressing hospitals to begin keeping electronic, rather than paper, records. Diamond doesn't use his iPhone for medical records, which in his clinic are still maintained on paper; he expects to move to a digital format later this year. He uses his iPhone for a number of other tasks. A medical-specific calculator application called Mediquations handles the wide range of math-related tasks confronting a medical doctor, with body-mass indexes, ideal body weights, acid-base balances, and some 200 other formulations doctors regularly use.