Dcotors and medical students are embracing mobile technologies such as iphone apps. This is only the tip of the iceberg as mobile technologies will truly transform the healthcare as we know it.
!["We saw that a lot of the physicians were using [iPhones] in the clinic," said Georgetown student Joseph Murray.](http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2009/05/18/PH2009051802241.jpg)
To his frustration, Steven Schwartz often encounters patients who have no idea what each of the pills they’ve been popping is called.
“But usually they can tell you what it looks like,” the Georgetown University Medical Center family practitioner said. “They might say it’s a blue, triangular pill for hypertension.”
Armed with an iPhone, Schwartz is able to play detective.
He uses an application called Epocrates to input pill characteristics, such as color, shape and clarity. The software replies with a list of medications and images that match those criteria, allowing him to deduce what the patient is taking.
Schwartz says his iPhone has become indispensable: He uses it to pull up instructional diagrams and videos for patients, write electronic prescriptions and check basic information, with the patient beside him.
” ‘This is how often you need a colonoscopy,’ I’ll say to a patient,” Schwartz said. “I’m just double-checking on my phone to make sure I don’t make a mistake.”
Doctors are also using smartphones to look up drug-to-drug interactions, to view X-rays and MRI scans, and even to stream music from the Internet during surgery.
The power and versatility of smartphones, Schwartz said, is leading more doctors to abandon their pagers and PDAs. Of the various smartphones on the market, such as the ones made by BlackBerry and T-Mobile, the iPhone’s graphic, audio, video and memory capabilities are helping it take the lead in the medical field.
Schwartz’s use of his iPhone speaks to a larger trend: Nationally, about 64 percent of doctors are now using smartphones, according to a recent report by the market research company Manhattan Research.
At George Washington University Hospital and the Johns Hopkins Health System, BlackBerrys are more popular than iPhones among physicians, according to officials at both institutions. Of the 700-plus smartphones in use by doctors, nurses and other hospital staff members at Johns Hopkins, only about 5 percent are iPhones, said Mike McCarty, the chief network officer at Hopkins; the rest are BlackBerrys. Although there are many applications being developed for the iPhone (the iTunes app store lists 674 applications related to medicine available), a lot of medical software used at Hopkins runs on the Windows operating system, which is what the BlackBerry uses, McCarty said.
McCarty believes that smartphones will soon assume a permanent place in medicine. “I think over time we will be replacing pagers with these devices,” he said. “Every clinician I meet says they want to be carrying one device, rather than two or three.”