The next time you go to your doctor’s office, check to see if he/she is using an iPhone, along with a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, to evaluate your health. With Apple’s announcement that it is allowing third party developers to create applications on the iPhone, Datamonitor believes that healthcare technology application, particularly electronic health records (EHRs) and clinical decision support (CDS), will be more likely to be adopted by physicians, translating into better healthcare for patients.

EHRs allow providers to access all the information on a patient in one place, giving them more information at the point of care. CDS tools help providers sort through the huge amount of patient data and medical literature now available, checking, for example, if the medication they are about to prescribe will interact with a drug the patient is already taking.

The iPhone, however, stands out from the rest of the currently available devices because of its functionality, easy of use and, quite frankly, appearance. The iPhone’s functionality is undisputed, as a phone, camera, media device and web browser all in one device, who needs anything else? Healthcare providers don’t want to carry around a beeper, hospital-issued phone, cell phone, BlackBerry and Tablet PC with them as they run through the corridors of a hospital. They want to carry around one device that can do everything and that’s what the iPhone is.

Why does a physician need a camera or iPod you might ask? Well, if you go to your primary care physician with a strange rash on your arm, your doctor could, hypothetically, take a picture of it and send it to a dermatologist for a second opinion. If you can’t remember what kind of medication you’re on, but you can remember what it looks like, your doctor can pull up pictures of drugs, right on the iPhone, that fit your description and figure out what you’re taking. For the iPod function, a doctor may want to take a quick refresher course on the different sounds a heart makes when the heart valve isn’t functioning properly. The possibilities are endless.

Further Reading: eHealthInsight Series: Reaching Doctors and Patients Through New Digital Media