Healthcare Software

Review of Mobile Applications for Healthcare

In a recent review of medical applications for iPhone and Android, I find that there is not too much that is being offered. I can the break the serious ones down into a few categories without missing out too many.

1. Reference material
   • Merck manual
   • Epocrates
   • ICD9 code lookup
2. Educational
   • Instant ECG
   • Anatomy quiz
3. Health tracking
   • Blood pressure
   • Diabetes diary
   • Migraine headache tracker
   • Fitness assessment
4. Utility
   • Medical calculator
   • Medical abbreviation finder

There are as of yet, no applications (aside from Epic Systems’ Haiku) which aim to do any form of patient management. Although this heavily limits the utility of smart phones used in healthcare contexts, it is probably for good reason. There are probably three main reasons for this:

1. Low demand (fewer than 100 doctors per 100,000 people in North America)

   Most mobile apps by their nature target mass appeal offering either a no or low-cost application. Revenue is achieved either through a high volume of sales or by mining collected data.

2. Legal trouble if device is lost

   The hospital IT department has to get involved if cell phones are being used to access or store patient data. In order to be HIPAA compliant, a good reference is this post on securing mobile data for HIPAA compliance. IT departments are hesitant to go through this effort at the moment.

3. No support in clinical context

   Most healthcare applications are well entrenched in the environment. Hospitals would have to adopt specifically mobile software and deploy it to everyone or support both versions in parallel and let the user decide. This will cost a lot and take a long time.

Until these issues can be fixed, the extent of medical software on mobile devices will remain in the categories outlined above. It is just a matter of time though until all of this changes.