Well, not through clinical versions of these applications of course. That would be an interesting approach though, especially the social networking idea may have many applications in health IT, but I’d like to talk about something else that is happening in front of our eyes.

Facebook, Twitter, Angry Birds and other big names of the mobile application market are doing something for us that would normally take a lot of effort, and would not probably be as effective, these applications are training clinicians for mobile device usage.

We were having a conversation with Professor Ingram (Professor David Ingram of UCL) last week, and he was talking about some mobile applications he has seen, which aim to provide information to clinicians on the iPhone.

This led me think about the success of iPhone and iPad, which id pretty much obvious, at least based on Apple’s company value and sales numbers. That success has led to a new computing platform that has a user base from all ages. Now this is quite interesting, because if you introduce a computing platform with a completely different user experience (touch vs mouse & keyboard) and a completely different operating system, that would normally be a huge challenge for your sales and marketing. People usually do not switch that easy, because learning to use new devices takes time.

Even on the same hardware and software platform, introducing a new application into healthcare is a tough task. When I was working for HIS vendors back in Turkey, everytime we used to introduce one of our products into a hospital or to a pharmacy we had to deal with the training of users. If you had an application that you were replacing things would get even harder, because users would ask for pretty much the same features to walk around the learning curve. “But we used to to use ctrl + F7 to switch to patient search!, This new program does not do it, it does not work!”

What has been harder, is to get clinicians use computers. Even if when they don’t have to type anything, getting a heavy weight professor to use a computer to check out computer records for a patient is not an easy task. They would almost loathe the use of computers, and if you ask them, some would say they are too busy to learn new stuff when they’ve got so much work to do (read: they’re too old to learn new stuff).

What is interesting is, the same professor would be checking his e-mails on his iPhone between patients, and he may even be checking the pictures of the grandsons and granddaugthers on Facebook. The grandson, at the age of 6, probably already has a Facebook account, opened by the parents (yes, there are parents who do that)

Medical students? Oh yes, they all have Facebook accounts, they tweet, they play angry birds, and they would probably skip courses about using computers for clinical practice.

Through various applications, an incredible amount of people are using mobile devices, and they’re getting good at using them. I don’t remember such a large number of people getting so good at using computers (which all smartphones and tablets are) so fast at any time in the last 28 years or so (I was seven when I started using computers, and I’ve been in front of them ever since)

So if I were to introduce a mobile app, whether on iPhone or on a tablet, chances are that other applications will already have trained the users for using the device. Desktop computers never caused such interest from end users. People used them because they had to, MS Office, Internet browsing and maybe gaming made people use them, but I don’t think it has ever been like what we’ve been seeing for the mobile platforms.

So there is a platform that is in the pockets and bags/backpacks of many clinicians, all the way from students to professors, and if you manage to put something there, it will probably be quite accessable to them. This is a big opportunity for people who are trying to introduce computing as a tool into the clinical practice. Sure, we can’t move everything to these platforms easily, they’re mostly information consumption devices, due to their design, but if it makes it easier to reach clinicians to provide them information, then it is still an advantage over the problems we have to deal with desktop platforms today.

So let them play Angry birds, and check Facebook. The better they get in using those devices, the less friction your next application is going to face. What we need to do , is to find out how to develop interactions that maximize the capabilities and common patterns of these platforms, because they’re different than what we’re used to. If we can do that, we can improve at least some aspects of health IT, simply because we’re able to reach a larger user base.