Apps for doctors on the iPhone Video

Apps for doctors on the iPhone Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:02

>> Epocrates creates products that are used by more than half a million healthcare professionals, including one in four physicians in the United States. I'd like to bring up Glenn Keighley to talk us through their experience with iPhone. ^M00:00:17 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:22

>> So, Epocrates is a leading provider of hand-held clinical reference applications for use by physicians to the point of care. And I've been a mobile developer for the last eight years developing applications for them and I can tell you that developing software for the iPhone is like developing for no other mobile platform. The sensation is developing for a much -- more powerful, stronger, almost desktop-like environment. And the main reason for this differentiation is the availability of the coco touch frameworks. So we were able to prototype our drug list review screen seen here in a matter of days and then it was quite simple to hook it up to our existing C-plus-plus data access classes and that allowed us to populate this list with 3300 of the most commonly prescribed U.S. drugs. Tapping on the drug takes you to the drug monograph. And monographs are just an industry term meaning a white paper detailing information about a drug. And this is where we were really excited because we were able to take advantage of some of the unique features of the iPhone. Like the Sequa light data base to store our drug formulation information and the enhanced screen resolution to show pill images on the device for the first time on any mobile platform. In addition to this, just adding other separate simpler content sections, such as there are adverse reactions, where we take advantage of the standard control of the table view and adding the screen literally took me an hour. So in addition to this in a clinical content, we were also able to use the core animation-backed frameworks to re-invent and re-innovate some of our existing functionality, for example Epocrates Multi-Check. Now, Multi-Check supports the case where a physician or -- sorry a patient may be on multiple medications and if the physicians wants to see -- are taking those medications together gonna result in any harmful adverse effects. So, it may seem the patient is taking the medication selected here, we can tap on add and immediately it flies in the drug list. The physician can then enter the drug name they want to add, tap on it and the drug list goes away. And all the animation is handled for us by the SDK. We didn't have to write a single extra line of code to do that, but it does look cool. ^M00:02:30 [ Laughter ] ^M00:02:32

>> So, tapping on Check you can then go through to the interaction results view and you see a list of the interactions associated with these medications grouped by the severity of the interaction. If you like more detail you can tap on an interaction pairing and that brings you through to the interaction detail view. Finally, we were able to take advantage of the richness of the iPhone you like to prototype some brand new functionality in the form of our drug identifier functionality. Now, this supports a case where a patient that come in to a doctor's office and say, "Hey, I'm taking this orange three-sided pill I found, but I'm not sure what it is." ^M00:03:04 [ Laughter ] ^M00:03:05

>> And the doctor can enter those criteria in to the Epocrates Rx application, tap on Identify drug and they'll be brought to a list of matching medications. ^M00:03:15 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:22

>> The physician can then tap on one of those matches and again that take him through to the Multi-Check -- sorry, that take him through to the monograph view. And this is how Epocrates is leveraging the advanced features of the iPhone to serve its core mission of supporting physician's clinical decisions and enhancing the quality and safety of patient care in the U.S. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot ^M00:03:42 [ Applause ]