The push to make healthcare more consumer-friendly has reached into yet another staple of everyday life: The cell phone.
The development of Apple’s new iPhone, whose 3G version was launched amid much fanfare last month, has spurred healthcare vendors to create applications for the transmission and storage of healthcare information on cell phones.
The movement gained ground at the Towards the Electronic Patient Record (TEPR) conference last May in Fort Lauderdale, where more than 2,000 attendees were invited to download mock health data on their cell phones as part of a nine-month-long project to demonstrate portability.
“The cell phone is becoming a digital health companion,” said J. Peter Waegemann, CEO of the Boston-based Medical Records Institute, which sponsors TEPR. “This will be a whole industry that will be developing in the coming year.”
TEPR featured a demonstration of AllOne Health Group, Inc.’s AllOne Mobile secure phone-based application. The Wilkes-Barre, Pa.-based developer of services for healthcare purchasers and payers has since deployed AllOne Mobile on a platform developed by Canada’s Diversinet to 350,000 members of Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Other insurance plans are interested in the standards-based approach, which could jump-start the use of personal health records by a broad segment of the population.
Diversinet formally launched its MobiSecure Wallet and Vault products in June. Company officials said the products work together to create a secure encrypted platform that gives end-users secure access to their data and documents.
The Wallet turns a mobile phone into a kind of remote control device that consumers can use to display, fax or e-mail data stored in the MobiSecure Vault server or from other data sources, said Jay Couse, senior vice president of Diversinet. The phone serves as a token-like device, and the consumer has a password, thus providing two-factor authentication.
The current version of AllOne Mobile requires users to input their health information, but Stuart Segal, AllOne’s vice president, said the company expects to offer a version that will pre-populate a user’s record with a payer’s claims data or pharmaceutical prescription information.
“From a personal health record perspective, it’s designed to be agnostic and certain elements are pretty standard,” he said. “As far as pulling claims information, it isn’t that far of a reach to get (a payer) system to download to our platform and then push that out over the phone.”
On July 14, Epocrates launched its clinical reference application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, available on the Apple App Store. The San Mateo, Calif.-based provider of clinical information and decision-making tools, which launched a Blackberry product last November that now boasts more than 200,000 customers, had been waiting for Apple to develop its new iPhone platform before releasing the new software.
“The iPhone platform is just so much more rich,” said Epocrates’ Michelle Snyder, who cites multimedia resources that can’t be used on a Blackberry or PDA. “Our value really comes from having updated information at the point of care.”
“I think we’re at the very early stages of where this is going,” said Greg Juhn, vice president of product strategy for A.D.A.M., Inc., an Atlanta-based provider of health information and benefits technology solutions. “There are a lot of times when you need health information and you’re not anywhere near your computer.”
“Of course, there’ll be lots of crap developed, too,” he added.
Editor Fred Bazzoli contributed to this story.