Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

Using Your Mobile Phone To Change Behavior Patterns

There is excitement in the air about how mobile phones are the breakthrough technology for changing health behavior.  Last Saturday, I was convinced this must be true. In two short hours, I:

*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*

iPhone Attachment Allows For Live View Of Eye Anatomy

There are a variety of tools available to help Ophthalmologists with eye examinations.  A new hardware and medical apps solution turns the iPhone into an ophthalmoscope.  Called the iExaminer, this simple iPhone 4 peripheral connects the popular Welch Allyn PanOptic ophthalmoscope to the iPhone 4, and then a native medical app helps you perform a fundus exams and share videos and images right from the iPhone.

Two key applications for this:

1) Teaching: For medical schools that are teaching eye examinations — instead of having to look at static pictures of eye anatomy, this “live view” could be an optimal and innovative way to teach. This could also be a great way for an ophthalmology attendings to save key eye pathology that they visualize in the mobile setting for teaching purposes.

2) Use in mobile clinics: This could be a good screening tool for various eye pathology — Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

Ivy League Medical Schools Embracing Technology For Teaching

Add Yale’s School of Medicine to the growing list of medical schools that are embracing the iPad as the primary source of medical teaching.

This upcoming year Yale will be giving their medical students, all 520 of them, an iPad 2 with an external wireless keyboard. We’ve covered with great depth the growing list of medical schools using iPads as the main tool for learning — such as Stanford, UC-Irvine, and many more.

“Yale School of Medicine this year will outfit all students with iPads and no longer provide printed course materials. The initiative, born out of a going-green effort, could Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

New App Allows Physicians To View High Quality, Interactive Medical Images

Fujifilm Synapase Mobility is now available in the U.S., and not just on the iPhone, but for the Android and iPad as well.  Fujifilm makes a variety of medical images devices, from ultrasound devices to computed radiology devices (x-rays).

If you use their backend server (Synapse PACS and Synapse RIS), you can now view your images on your mobile devices. What’s really interesting about their mobile suite is that it’s browser is independent, scalable, and doesn’t just display static images.

Currently the system isn’t FDA approved, but with the amount of business Fujifilm already has in the medical ecosystem, one would think this would happen sooner than later.

..It provides Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

Are Doctors Using Their iPads Too Much In The Work Setting?

Great blog piece in Forbes by Tom Gillis — VP of Cisco’s Security Technology Business Unit — on how hospital Chief Security Officers (CSOs) are having issues with managing physician use of mobile devices at work.  He had dinner with the CSOs of five major healthcare providers, who stated their biggest headache is how Doctors love their iPads and want to use them for work.

Gillis is in the business of enterprise security, and he gives an insider’s perspective on mobile device use in the hospital setting.  He writes about the fundamental shift in how physicians are consuming content.  Before the proliferation of mobile devices, hospitals had complete control of managing the “endpoint” — how the content was consumed.  This is no longer the case, and since these personal devices have created a new paradigm, IT teams are left playing catchup.

It was refreshing to hear Gillis talk about how the solution Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles