Of the wide-ranging 100,000 iPhone apps, approximately 2,000 are healthcare related, according to an overview by the mHealth Initiative of the exploding field of clinical and consumer healthcare applications available on mobile devices (mDevices). Close to an additional 3,000 healthcare applications are available for other types of smart phones.
Some of these 5,000 healthcare applications have widespread adoption. Epocrates, for example, reports more than 100,000 users just on the iPhone and, when taking into account access through other devices, a worldwide subscriber base of 750,000.
Most of the current application developments are directed toward clinicians. They include: drug databases; medical calculators; reference programs; decision support for both physicians and nurses; tracking (e.g., weight, blood pressure); patient history accessing, managing and documenting; communication managers; and payer tools (e.g., coding, eligibility determination). Among these, references and decision support dominate the field of clinical applications, with 3,700 identified.
In the first year of operation, Apple’s applications store brought in more than 65,000 applications, 100,000 registered developers, 1.5 billion application downloads, and availability to consumers across 77 countries through 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices sold. According to VisionMobile Research, Apple’s application store had about 100,000 applications by the end of 2009, Google’s Android had 10,000, and Nokia’s Ovi Store had 4,000.
The industry is in the midst of reorganizing medical information and making it available at the point of care through mobile devices. Documenting patient care on mobile devices, however, will require easier, more cost-effective documentation methods, speech recognition, structured-purpose communication and other developments to converge. Some of the developers report that healthcare applications are in such high demand they may result in a real healthcare revolution.
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