Tech Rx for Doctor's: The Iphone

Version 2.0 of the iPhone's firmware, due this June, could turn the device into an indispensable medical tool if hospitals OK its medical use.
Photo illustration: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

The arrival this June of an enterprise-friendly iPhone is exciting to more than just business users. Doctors, too, are eyeing Apple's handheld and wondering if it could kill off the old-fashioned clipboard and X-ray light box once and for all.

"If you could use the gesture-based way of manipulating images on the iPhone and actually manipulate a stack of X-rays or CT scans, that would be a huge selling point," says Adam Flanders, director of informatics at Thomas Jefferson University and an expert in medical imaging.

To date, such a feature has remained a pipe dream due to most smartphones' inability to handle the sophisticated compression techniques used on large medical images. Also, most phones lack the requisite memory and image-processing capabilities.

Then there are the security concerns: As Flanders notes, hospital CIOs are also understandably wary of beaming medical images all over the place via WiFi. But the iPhone's reasonably powerful Samsung ARM processor, 8 GB or 16 GB of flash memory and intuitive, visual interface seem well suited to medical imagery. And the iPhone's new business-friendly security features may ease privacy fears, physicians say, and could even turn the device into an indispensable medical tool if hospitals OK the device.

Tech-savvy doctors have been speculating about the iPhone's medical potential long before Apple shipped its first unit. But the lack of native application support has meant that, up to now, all iPhone applications had to work through the phone's Safari web browser. That's a nonstarter for most medical applications because it demands constant connectivity (either via WiFi or an AT&T cellular data network) and prevents application developers from using the device's full processing power.

Earlier this month, however, Apple released a software development kit (SDK) for programmers to create native iPhone applications. During the announcement event, Apple gave doctors the first concrete reason to trade in their Blackberries and Treos for iPhones by announcing a new partnership with Epocrates, the developer of a massive drug-interaction database for mobile devices. While Palm users have had access to Epocrates for years, the company said it is now working directly with Apple on a new iPhone-native version. When released, it will give doctors the ability to view drug information regardless of their location or the availability of a WiFi.

"The real beauty of the iPhone is that it offers a richer 3-D experience and more memory," says Michelle Snyder, vice president of marketing and subscription services at Epocrates.

But medical databases -- be they native like Epocrates, or browser-based, like Unbound Medicine's medical research database -- are only part of the iPhone's overall allure in the medical field. Physicians, particularly radiologists, are also excited about the prospect of accessing medical images directly on their iPhones.

Flanders, who regularly looks for ways to apply new imaging techniques to the radiology field, says he's already seen a number of "neat tricks" with compression in recent years that can deliver hundreds of images on a handheld device, with a high resolution as well as the ability to manipulate those images.

Such applications might actually work better through a browser-based interface, Flanders says.

"The neatest stuff that I've seen so far is where all the rendering is server side -- where none of the heavy lifting is actually happening on the client," Flanders says. "So even if you have a medical image that requires some manipulation -- something like a 3-D model of someone's brain -- it's all happening server side. That way, you can really get away with a lot less horsepower on the client app."

Whether it's new imaging apps or a database of patient information, ultimately, the same concerns that businesses have expressed about the iPhone will be the ones that hospital IT departments will bring up. Is it secure enough? Can hospitals guarantee patient privacy when data is being stored or accessed on iPhones? And can the popular handset stand up to the rigorous demands of a busy hospital environment?

When version 2.0 of the iPhone's firmware becomes available this June, along with a host of new native iPhone applications, we'll see whether Apple is able to fill that prescription.

By Bryan Gardiner 03.20.08 | 6:00 PM