iPhone: Just What the Doctor Ordered?

By Nicole Martinelli (12:18 am, Mar 24 2009)

There have been a number of stories recently about doctors armed with iPhones, using the device to save time and start making the almost extinct house call come back.
Business Week got on the case with a long feature about “Dr. iPhone,” calling it a “critical tool for saving time and improving the quality of the care” provided by the doc profiled, Dan Diamond, a family practitioner who works at the Doctors Clinic in Silverdale, Washington.

“If I leave my iPhone at home, I will turn around and go back for it,” he says. “It’s that important.”
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.”

Interesting that traditional media is looking into how smart phones change the medical profession — just like they are changing police work and other sectorsÃ‚Â –Ã‚Â but how many docs use them?

Photo credit: Lezlie Sterling (sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)

4 comments »

About the author

Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on Twitter , Facebook and Google+.

If you're doing something new/cool that's Apple related, email her about it.

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Posted in iPhone, iPhone 3G |

Ross
My consultant whipped out an iPhone last week when he heard I had started smoking again, and using an iPhone app (don’t know which one though), calculated my risk factor for coronary heart disease, based on various parameters – my blood pressure, weight, cholesterol etc. [Luckily for me it's only 3.1% in the next 10 years]. He said he was using the iPhone because the health centre’s network was down and the computers weren’t on, though I think it was more showing off! I was impressed that not only was he able to use technology to quickly find out genuinely useful information but also that a portable device such as the iPhone could be used in this way, wherever the doctor may be.
It seems that tools such as this will be useful in the future as doctors have access to important diagnostic / risk calculation / emergency procedural information no matter if in the hospital, surgery, patient’s home or even outside. Good stuff!
tom swift
My spouse is an MD and has been using a Palm PDA to access Epocrates Essentials for years. Sorry, the idea of using a hand-held device to access medical information on-the-fly is not an Apple invention.
No Name
Why is the text all in bold?
alex
tom-its hardly ever an entirely new thing with apple. they just do it better than anyone else ever has. so thats whats new. it works, it works well, and it improves on good ideas.