Smartphones as the New PCs; Connecting to Healthcare Professionals and Consumers

I have been using my new smartphone, a Palm Pre, for about a month now. I have posted a number of previous notes about the use of such devices for educating healthcare consumers and reporting lab test results to physicians (see: Making e-Health Information Accessible with Smart Phones; The Mobile Web and the Future of eHealth). Various features of this device have greatly impressed me, not the least of which has been the ease of surfing the web and the ability to quickly download new applications. A recent article referred to "smartphone apps" as the foundation for a new gold rush and I completely agree (see: Smartphone apps are the technology world's new gold rush). Below is an excerpt from it:

Credit Suisse recently projected that total smartphone sales for 2009 will end up at around 176 million units. In the years ahead, Credit Suisse expects the smartphone market to balloon to around 1.5 billion units. By comparison, worldwide unit sales of all mobile phones in 2009 will be about 1.2 billion and worldwide unit sales of all PCs in 2009 will be about 300 million....Beyond smartphone applications, there are several additional forces at work that are going to drive the growth of the smartphone market:

• This next generation of mobile broadband will unleash a new wave of software applications and video services on smartphones. It will also enable augmented reality software to let smartphones interact with the real world.

• [T]he mobile phone will become [the PC for people in emerging economies] because cellular towers are much easier and cheaper to deploy and there are inexpensive ways to generate small bursts of recharging power....
  

• [A]ll mobile phones will naturally become smartphones as their underlying software takes on more advanced functions and vendors become less likely to build their own OS and more likely to use an open source mobile OS like Android or license Windows Mobile or Palm’s webOS.

Vendors and developers are already anticipating the day when there will be over a billion smartphone users on the planet. Having seen the runaway success of the iPhone App Store (which, frankly, happened as much in spite of Apple as because of it), mobile platform vendors do not want to concede this huge competitive advantage to Apple. Thus, all the big ones are building their own app repositories and are wooing software developers to write applications.

Let me simply restate the obvious by saying that smartphone will be an essential means by which the clinical labs will communicate test results to physicians. Rotating my smartphone by 90 degrees changes the screen format to landscape. Although I have commented in the past that cell phones did not provide enough screen "real estate" to display lab reports, I have now changed by mind about this. With "hand gestures" that can be used to magnify text or images, a touch-sensitive screen, and superb screen resolution, it will be a simple matter for physicians to read lab reports using these devices. The next step, clearly, will be the development of applications running on smart phones that will assist clinicians in "digesting" a set of lab test results and provide diagnostic support.

Until such time as such diagnostic support apps are available, clinicians can always point their smartphone browser to the ARUP Consult, which is a "Physician's Guide to Laboratory Test Selection and Interpretation." I have highlighted this excellent resource in a previous blog note (see: ARUP Offers Lab Algorithms for Disease Diagnosis Support). Here are some more details copied from the web site:

• Nearly 2,000 lab tests categorized into disease-related topics
• Disease topics include clinical background information, test ordering suggestions, and concise diagnostic advice
• More than 50 algorithms support clinical decision-making
• New and updated content released 6 times a year
• Co-authored and maintained by experts at the University of Utah School of Medicine and ARUP Laboratories