Is Your Doctor Treating You with His iPhone?

Megan Kiecker

Design Intern

Sight Marketing

Doctors around the world are taking advantage of the new iPhone applications. There are over 1,500 medical applications available. Less than half can be used a in a professional health care setting, yet the uses for these applications seem endless as they can provide diagnoses, eye tests, medical calculators, anatomical diagrams, and more. Imagine how convenient it would be for a doctor to be able to pull up all your medical information when you call them so that they are completely aware of your situation. Now they can.

Allscripts Remote is an application that allows doctors to review a patient’s summary while speaking with the patient on his/her iPhone. He can view prescription details that include a full medication search, and send up-to-date patient summary information to emergency rooms. Another application known as Dr. Rounds, keeps track of when and why patients were seen and saves doctors time on making daily checklists. Epocrates is an extremely popular app. A couple of its functions include allowing users to check medication dosing, and cross reference medications for possible interactions and side effects.

The iPhone is revolutionizing the medical world, as it benefits both doctors and patients alike. Doctors can access information quickly and more easily, and some apps can even save patients unnecessary trips to the doctor. All this leaves me wondering what could the iPhone possibly do next.