Complemedia and Healthday Partner On Mobile Health App Development
HealthDay and Complemedia, Inc. two companies with a strong track record in providing and distributing medical content, have teamed up to produce new health-based applications for mobile devices known as smart phones.
Together, HealthDay and Complemedia’s MedicinePhone platform will provide clients in a variety of health fields the opportunity to develop their own branded smart phone applications, which can target specific information and news to medical and health professionals.
“The MedicinePhone platform is helping us expand our health and medical news distribution to wireless platforms and at the same time we will be able to help our customers reach new audiences,” said Dan McKillen, HealthDay CEO. “This is a good opportunity to take advantage of the explosive growth in smart phones as a productivity tool.”
The content can be customized to a client’s specific needs, McKillen said, from the latest medical journal updates that a physician will find useful, to the latest news about specific diseases and conditions of interest to the consumer.
Why use smart phones as the delivery device? A recent survey reported in the online edition of Money found that six-of-ten physicians preferred iPhones and almost all health administrators preferred the Blackberry.
In the future, health professionals could increasingly be using smart phones “for a wide variety of tasks, including tracking patients, ordering lab tests, viewing X-rays and CAT scans, making clinical decisions and ‘e-prescribing’ drugs,” the article said.
In addition, according to a recent Manhattan Research report, Physicians in 2012: The Outlook for On Demand, Mobile, and Social Digital Media, eighty-one percent of physicians will own smart phones by 2012.
One of MedicinePhone and HealthDay’s latest client is Pri-Med, a Massachusetts-based company with a Web-based health/medical platform offering interactive services for leading medical institutions and healthcare professionals. The Pri-Med iPhone App is available in the App Store now and in addition to news for Primary Care professionals, provides users with access to CME programs and the ability to register for live meetings.