Launching a modern-day medical miracle

This month, Apple unveiled its long-awaited Software Development Kit (SDK) for the iPhone and iPod touch. These devices use a version of Mac OS X that has been adapted for use with touch-sensitive devices rather than a mouse and keyboard, and developers have been wanting to get their mitts on it for ages.

Apple has relented and decided to turn the iPhone/iPod touch into a genuine computing platform. Whether this turns out to be another genius move by Steve Jobs, or whether it turns the iPhone/iPod touch into Jobs’s Newton, wait and see.

At the launch, Apple had a number of developers on hand to show off applications they’d built using early versions of the SDK. Mostly they were games, but there was at least one with a serious side.

epocrates, a company that makes medical database software, has ported its flagship pharmaceutical lookup tool to the iPhone/iPod touch (I really need a more efficient way to refer to these devices collectively). The application allows doctors to look up any given pharmaceutical and find out whether there are known interactions or prescriptions on its usage with other pharmaceuticals.

This is very useful, and most doctors have such a tool on their desktop computers. It would be useful for paramedics and emergency room personnel to have such a thing on a portable device, to save them having to consult a desktop computer or lug a laptop around to get that information wherever the sick or injured person happens to be.

Then it got silly. The Mac OS X Touch™ version of the application includes high-res images of each particular medication as they’re sold under different brands. The man demonstrating that feature said it would be useful “if a teenager walks into your office and says I’ve been taking these three-sided pills I found and I’m wondering what they are”.

Huh? So this teenager is stupid enough to take some unlabelled pills they “found” without knowing what they are or what they will do, but somehow is also sensible enough to consult medical advice on the subject? Is anyone that dumb? Does this happen so often in clinical practice that an application specifically to deal with it had to be written?

And if the pharmaceutically adventurous idiots are coming “into your office” why do you need the program to be on a portable device? Are we anticipating that doctors will be approached on the bus and asked for their advice about pills people have found and begun using?

Don’t be silly. Doctors don’t take the bus.

The thing is, the app does have sensible uses. When people are admitted to hospital and have to remember the often long lists of medications they’re taking, often with complicated names that are similar to the names of completely different medications, a little visual help might be handy. I’ve known people who’ve got into fairly serious strife that way.

But if the guy who wrote the program has to make it sound weird and useless because he didn’t think of that, maybe he’s not the guy to be doing the demos.

Matthew JC. Powell likes the blue ones better than the red ones. Share your favourite M&Ms with mjcp@optusnet.com.au

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