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Smart Phones Finding Voice in Health Care


By Beckie Kelly Schuerenberg, Senior Editor February 2006
Dan Diamond, M.D., began using a smart phone about a year ago. The family physician, who practices at The Doctors Clinic in Silverdale, Wash., bought the mobile hardware to replace two devices-a PDA and a cell phone-he had been using during clinical care.

"It's awesome to carry only one device," says Diamond, also a clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle. "When I was using a cell phone and PDA, I sometimes wouldn't have both devices with me, so I either couldn't make calls or get the information I needed."

Diamond now uses a Treo 600, from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Palm Inc., to call physicians and nurses, access e-mail and his personal schedule, and check medical reference applications from San Mateo, Calif.-based Epocrates Inc.

Like many early smart phone adopters, however, Diamond isn't using his device to enter patient data or access complex clinical software or the Internet. "Data transmission speeds are slow and the memory capabilities are too limited," he says.

Smart phones, which have been on the market just over two years, are designed to be converged devices that provide the application functionality of PDAs with the voice capabilities of cell phones. They run on a variety of nationwide mobile phone networks, and some models are embedded with technology that enables them to be used over Wi-Fi networks.

Converged devices always generate a buzz when they hit the marketplace, and smart phones are no exception. However, like many first-generation technologies, the devices still have a ways to go before they match the hype.

"There are some kinks-including limited battery life-that need to be worked out before smart phones are widely adopted," says Lynne Bishop, an analyst at Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass. "But they are still in their first generation, so users have some legitimate gripes about their limitations."

But there are encouraging signs for smart phones, Bishop believes. Adoption has been slow, but that can be expected because of the limited amount of health care applications for smart phones. However, clinicians have been more eager than general consumers to use the mobile devices because they are well suited for care delivery, Bishop says.

"There are many productivity and patient care benefits that can be gained by using smart phones in health care," she says. "We're still in the early phases of their use. But as more application vendors make their software available on smart phones and wireless infrastructures are upgraded and extended, this is the way medicine will go."

Early kinks

A plethora of clinical software vendors recently have designed applications that can be stored on smart phones.

The problem is that the devices have very limited memory compared with more established mobile hardware. For example, the Treo 650 has only 32 MB of memory, while Palm's LifeDrive PDA has 4 GB.

Diamond, who's using an earlier version of the Treo, quickly ran out of memory for his smart phone. He stores some reference applications on a flash card, which fits in the SD card slot on his smart phone. But limited memory is preventing him from purchasing more clinical reference applications for the device, he says.

Some smart phone applications don't require data to be stored on the devices. Many of these systems are designed to mobilize legacy software that runs on local area networks. But provider organizations often must make expensive upgrades to their infrastructures to ensure that they have the Wi-Fi signal strength or necessary connectivity to mobile phone networks to support these applications on smart phones, says Bishop, the consultant.

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