Healthcare and medical apps on the iPad

After much anticipation, we finally got our iPad today. The device was shipped directly from it’s factory in China, and UPS guy seemed well aware what he was delivering — he mentioned that he has 40 more in his truck for our neighbors.

I have been playing with it since this afternoon. After 5 hours of heavy use (video games, and streaming full length TV shows), the battery still has 62% remaining. I am extremely impressed so far! The games (racing / driving, board, and first person shooter games in particular) are simply stunning. And news / media apps from ABC and New York Times are very well done. While all iPhone apps run on the iPad, it has become obvious to me that apps specifically designed for the iPad gonna add so much value that people will happily pay for them again. It is the same force that drive people to iPhone apps from mobile web sites. In fact, I have already spent more than $30 on iPad apps and deleted most of the iPhone-only apps from my device.

While the iPad is positioned as a media consumption device, it is launched with over 100 medical and healthcare apps. From what I can see, the medical education apps for medical students and physicians are bigger winners since they can really take advantage of the larger screen and new UI to present information much more effectively than before. I think that EMR apps should also benefit tremendously as those apps are quite information intensive with a lot of data input fields in each screen.

On the consumer / personal healthcare side, most apps today are also educational in nature. After all, iPhone’s ubiquity and smaller screen is probably more fitting for simpler “tracker” tools. However, I do see great potentials for more sophisticated personal health records / assessment tools on the iPad. Instead of layers of navigation screens to drill down to a specific lab or family history item, we can now present information in a much more concise fashion.

Furthermore, at Ringful Health, we thrive to provide trackers that actually give actionable intelligence back to the users and their physicians. For those apps (e.g. Pain Manager and Healthy Heart), it is often important to track symptoms, medications, and lab results separately, and then see their correlations in the analytics reports. I believe that the iPad provides a great platform to present this information more effectively.

As Ringful works on our new generation of personal health record apps, we will certainly be targeting the iPad specific optimizations as well as our existing portfolio of iPhone, Blackberry, and Android devices! Stay tuned!