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The First iPhone Doctor

Who has never heard about Jay Parkinson, founder of HelloHealth service, the first online medical practice? Now please meet Dr. Hodge, the first iPhone doctor.

Hodge’s start-up Personal Pediatrics aims to equip a fleet of self-starter pediatricians in major metro areas with iPhones, cloud-based practice software and the marketing know-how to court new parents, families and corporate health programs alike. The company’s plan points to a growing trend of doctors returning to what was once a mainstay of the profession: the house call.

Hodge has already established that the iPhone doctor model works — after more than a decade working in a pediatrics office in St. Louis, Missouri, where she saw up to 35 patients a day for about 10 minutes each, Hodge traded in the patient assembly line to launch Personal Pediatrics. That was three years ago. Back then she had her laptop and Palm Treo in tow.

personal pediatrics

I have to mention one thing first. The whole health 2.0 movement is not about transforming the healthcare system into an online service, but there are more and more people who want to reach healthcare services through online or mobile applications.

If there are no patients who want to be online, no doctors will build such services. That’s how it works.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

When Your iPhone Finishes Your Sentences

I personally find the word-completion tool kind of annoying on the iPhone – especially as a doc. The software is geared towards choosing the most common word after a few letters, and you can bet that physicians are not typing out common words. Like “emycin” is not “empty” – I’m just sayin’.

A couple of awkward ones recently – my friend was texting me about a tragic and unexpected event and I responded with “Geeze!” which (as I pressed send) turned into “Geese!” That one was hard to explain, and quite insensitive at the time. Err…

Another friend of mine was dealing with a sick kitty at home. She had taken the cat to the vet because she’d stopped eating/going to the litter box. The kitty was diagnosed with an infection and was on the road to recovery, when a couple days later she had her first bowel movement. So my friend decided to text her husband the good news via her iPhone. She typed “the cat went poo,” but alas, the iPhone had the last word. Her husband received this alarming, if not perplexing text message:

“the cat went pop”

Have you had similar iPhone drama? Do share…

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