Every industry these days wants a bite of the mobile app, but healthcare seems to be wanting to take the biggest portion — and for good reason.
Doctors are now adopting mobile healthcare apps in order to better serve their patients while at the same time cutting costs. Medical mobile apps are more time efficient and effective as well as accurate. They allow patients to take more control over their own healthcare plan.
Doctors and patients are now able to keep in touch with one another and exchange vital information about patient health via medical text messaging. Medicaid is just one healthcare sector in which mobile healthcare apps can be extremely helpful. By filling out one form electronically, this information will then be automatically routed to the appropriate program with minimal interaction and paperwork.
Mobile healthcare technology has improved so much as of late that consumers are now able to comparison shop between medical plans and even find their way around Mayo Clinic facilities. Below is a helpful list of the best mobile healthcare apps out there today.
Visible Health’s DrawMD: When it comes to mobile healthcare solutions, this free iPad app is a great little invention that allows doctors to show patients exactly what the procedure entails and how the doctor will perform the procedure. If provides interactive, digital diagrams that can be drawn on to point out specifics.
Visible Body’s 3D Human Anatomy Atlas: Medical students, doctors, and patients can all use this app to get a close-up look at all our body’s systems. The app includes more than 2,500 accurate individual structures including organs and nerves and is available for iPad/iPhone and Google Android.
Isabel Healthcare’s Diagnosis Decision Support System: This 10 year old program is now available on Apple devices and helps doctors on the go. The app functions as a checklist to let physicians enter patient symptoms and search a database of nearly 6,000 diseases. Drop down menus help you refine your search down to age, gender and travel history.
VaxNation: Developed by Rice University and University of Texas students, this healthcare app helps people keep track of their vaccinations so that doctors don’t have too. For example, when was the last time you got a tetanus shot? Simply look it up on the app. Enter information such as birth date and previous vaccinations and it will recommend other vaccinations you may need in the future.
EZ Derm’s Electronic Health Record System: Not all mobile healthcare apps are created equal, and this one is definitely useful in the dermatologist sector of the medical world. The app uses cloud-based medical speech recognition technology so dermatologists can dictate notes into the system. It also includes accurate 3D body maps which can be draw on using a stylus.
These are just a few helpful apps currently available. In the future, it would save both time and money for the U.S. to switch to mobile apps when dealing with healthcare and medical patients. Right now, the Netherlands leads the world in medical practices that use electronic records, with 99% participation in electronic medical record keeping, though we are not far behind with 46% of American practitioners using electronic apps.