Read this quote from the article below:
“The most popular downloaded apps were games, followed by news and weather, and social networking.
This brings me right back to an earlier post today – tons and gluts of mobile and other software that consumers don’t use – please start with some aggregation processes to cut out the volume here. Healthcare applications and PHRs have nothing to entice the consumer and show no VALUE outside the normal geek community. You put something in their hand with instant information and watch the eyes light up, nobody understands immediate value today and keeps fighting the same old frustration levels and more software keeps appearing. If you again look at the most popular items in the quote above, hint, hint…see what shoes VALUE, as the information is all right in the consumer’s hand.
What’s On the Agenda Tonight–World of Warcraft or Work on My Personal Health Record
Like I said in the earlier article no role models and for the most part a big load of tech luddites in key positions in the country and in private industry too, why we get all those OMG CEO stories tin the news sometimes.
Thirty-five percent of adult cellphone users have apps to book a table at
a restaurant, check in with friends on Facebook and find their way through GPS maps.
But only one-quarter of those cellphone owners are using those apps. Taking pictures and text messaging remain the most popular things to do with wireless gadgets, according to two surveys released Tuesday.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Nielsen Co. joined in announcing their findingsPIP_Nielsen Apps Report FINAL .pdf on cellphone app use with two surveys showing that even amid the excitement of new apps-centric smart phones, users are slow to embrace the technology.
Post Tech - One-third cell phone users have apps, but few using them: Pew, Nielsen surveys
Barbara,
ReplyDeleteInteresting and timely post. Spent a couple of hours with a physician colleague now working for a restart company designing an app for iPod/iPhone fitted with a medical grade bar code reader shell. The design is to replace the tethered bar-code readers used in medication administration in the hospital to improve patient safety.
Bottom line is that I was thinking the whole time if this company's goal is patient safety they are targeting the wrong population. Sure, medication errors occur in the hospital but when comparison to the medical errors that occur in total I think the hospital based errors maybe insignificant. At least in the hospital there's a medical trained nurse selecting a medication that's delivered by a pharmacist with relatively clear instructions and tools on when to deliver the medications.
There are roughly 9000 hospitals nation wide and estimating the average beds per hospital at 100 we're looking at 900,000 beds.
In contrast there are roughly that many allopathic physicians writing probably averaging 20 patients a day and writing prescriptions on at least half of those patients for somewhere around 9,000,000 patients. These patients go to the pharmacies, often with paper scripts with a certain number of them illegible.
They take the prescriptions home and start taking them without any medical supervision. Some experiment, others have difficulty remembering or schedules get in the way and they also take over-the-counter medications.
I would venture to say that on any day there are as many patient safety medication errors in the home than there are in all of the hospitals in a given year.
What we need is a very simple app that makes it easy for the physician, pharamacist, nurse or patient to either download or enter their prescriptions and have it do the following:
1) alarm when a medication is due to be taken
2) show a picture of the pill
3) have two buttons (taken, skipped) to push
This app would also provide the patient with drug to drug interactions so if they stopped by the counter to pick up Claritin, ibuprofen, whatever, they could scan the UPC code and it would automatically be added and alert the patient if there was a drug-drug interaction with their prescriptions.
It would also link to important drug information leaflets so they could review as often as they wanted by clicking on the picture of the pill how to take it, etc.
Finally, when the prescription expired the medication would drop from their list.
They could at any time show their current medication list to any physician they were seeing so they wouldn't have to try to recall as well as provide a history of the administration over time (important for medications like warfarin).
By targeting our medication administration applications at patients rather than nurses and designed for home we might actually affect patient safety effectively AND lower physician office visits, admissions to hospitals and GASP begin to lower the cost of medical care.
Continuing to focus on health care providers might be seen for the waste of time it probably is.
Let's try this again. Tried posting this earlier:
ReplyDeleteAch! my comment was too large. Here's the link to my comment to this post: http://drvoran.blogspot.com/2010/09/patient-safety-maybe-were-looking-at.html