As readers of my blog know, I'm passionate about mobile technology.I believe that iPhone/Android smartphones, iPod Touch, and the Ipad, Playbook, Galaxy, Streak will become the platform for healthcare Desktops with complex operating systems, antivirus, and heavy "thick client" applications will disappear. Ray Ozzie's farewell message to Microsoft describes a post PC world.
As we think about EHRs in the post PC world, I can envision an App Store for modular EHR components. The Harvard SHARP grant SMArt team is working on this idea.
What about a healthcare App Store for patients that brings the PHR to the iPhone/iPod/iPad/Android etc.
Last week, Quest introduced Gazelle which brings powerful PHR functionality to smart phones. It's my cool technology of the week.
Gazelle includes automated lab results and educational materials, medication list, immunization list, allergy list, medical contacts, in case of emergency information - everything you need to share your medical records in an emergency.
CLIA rules complicated that delivery of lab data directly to patients, but new revisions to regulations have made this easier.
A lifetime medical record with educational materials on smartphones - that's cool.
3 comments:
See also Cloud PHR, which can pull data from Quest, Walgreens, etc through Google Health. A free version is also available.
If anyone tries them out, I'd love to hear from you.
While I believe that mobile devices hold great promise, I am not yet willing to jump on the death of the PC bandwagon. There are simply some things that the PC does better than any other platform and I can't see this changing. For example, the PC is still the absolute best platform for high-end computer gaming. It also rocks for serious multitasking, document preparation, video or sound work, etc.
To put it in simple term, there are sometimes no substitute for a 24" screen, with an i7 920, two TB of hard drive space, and an ATI 5970 handling the GPU chores. There is no task this hardware can't handle, without compromise. The only thing it can't do well is leave my desktop.
While we may eventually move to an OS and key programs delivered from the clouds (we already do this for many computer games via the Steam platform), the combination of far stronger computing and video hardware, bigger screens, and ability to realistically work on multiple projects at the same time will keep a PC in my offices for the foreseeable future.
What I do think we will see is the full convergence of devices/platforms, so that we can take the same document/program/game/file etc. and be able to work on it on any platform.
I concur fully that modern mobile devices hold tremendous promise for medical care, as health care requires mobility. The post-iPad world may bring some interesting advances, as other vendors release products with built-in USB ports, Flash support, and Windows 7 as an option.
While I am certainly eager to see how portable devices will transform delivery. I think james has a point, that portable devices will not be able to replace some systems for a good deal of time. The other concern I have with using portable devices is the security of the information that must be transmitted. Up to this point, I have heard a great deal of talk about all these promises but have heard very little about how to secure it all.
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