iPhone and iPod touch helping doctors help you

We knew we should have listened to our mothers and became doctors instead of web developers. At least we’d spend more time using these cool iPhone tools to improve patient care instead of surfing YouTube all day. These three new medical applications indicate that the iPhone and iPod touch are starting to make their way into doctors’ offices and hospitals.

1. Drug Information - Epocrates web-based drug guide

2. Practice Managment - Software from MacPractice

3. Health News - The Chondriac health news reader

Drug Information

Having free drugs at your fingertips may sound like a dream to your friends in Amsterdam, but over here it might get you arrested. With this free drug database from Epocrates (now optimized for iPhone and iPod touch), it’s like having a drug dealer on speed dial. Well, okay, maybe more like a pharmacist.

Epocrates has long been regarded as the gold standard of mobile reference tools for doctors and clinicians, and their applications run natively on a broad range of mobile platforms (Palm, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry). They have recently released an iPhone optimized version of their web-based drug reference tool, Epocrates Online, which features drug content written for the health care professional. We would love to see the entire Epcocrates mobile suite running native on the iPhone, and perhaps we’ll get our wish after Apple releases the SDK next year. Until then, you’ll need a PDA or Smartphone to use the native Epocrates applications. In the meantime, you can access the Epocrates Online drug information with iPhone or iPod touch at m.epocrates.com/iphone.

Practice Managment

For professional grade practice management software on the iPhone, you may find what you need with MacPractice, offering specific solutions for medical doctors, dentists, chiropractors, and optometrists. MacPractice software is very robust with the ease-of-use design that Macintosh is famous for. And MacPractice now has iPhone and iPod touch access built in, allowing you to use several key features from the convenience of your Apple device.

• Log in to view patients with appointments any day
• Search for a patient
• View patient contact information
• Tap to email a patient
• Tap to call a patient
• Review patient Rx history

Health News

There is no shortage of health-related news web sites available, but Chondriac (a new tool from mobile app creators, dataXform) makes it much easier to read that news on your iPhone or iPod touch. The news is organized nicely into categories for men, women, and children. There are also news categories for specific diseases and ailments, along with hooks to topical health care blogs. The app is very responsive and features the intuitive slider UI common in many iPhone web applications.

Point your iPhone or iPod touch to www.chondriac.com to start reading health care news today. You can also access Chondriac using Safari 3 from your desktop computer and the same URL above.

source: http://www.touchtip.com/