Doctors and patients jumping on mHealth and changing healthcare as we know it?

Donna Cusano

Well, that was fast…one of the major publications in the US hospital management field, Hospitals & Health Networks, puts an iPhone and a (unlabeled) bottled water on the (print) cover with the brash statement ‘Got kidney stones? There’s an app for that.’ And there is…developed by a Chicago urologist, with 2,500 downloads from the Apple AppStore. To quote the great Durante, ‘everybody’s gettin’ into the act’, from traditional healthcare providers, big pharma and researchers. The picture is that hospitals are running to catch up with clinician demand and rethinking workflows. EMR/EHR companies like Epic now have iPhone versions. Physicians and health systems are jumping on iPads, connecting them to hospital networks with Citrix and native interfaces (where available). See the discussion on Wi-Fi and how its latest version may jam existing devices, along with interference with telemetry, RF and pacemakers. mHealth (cover story), Hospitals & Health Networks