There are several thousand medical apps on the App store and iTunes that do everything from display EKGs, calculate medication dosing to provide 360-degree views and information about the human skeletal structure.
But some believe that developing medical apps for the for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, or Google’s Android platform is not worth the risk.
One such individual is Mathew Johnson, founder and inventor of the Phrazer, a multilingual medical communications system. When he invented the Phrazer, he was looking for a hardware platform for the software, but in the end decided to build the hardware himself instead of going with available tablets.
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For one, Apple and other hardware and software manufacturers are constantly tinkering with their products, so people developing for these platforms don’t have any control over product updates. Any change on these systems will likely affect the app that was developed for them. And while regular apps that are not tied to patient’s wellbeing can afford to be buggy, mobile medical apps have a higher standard.
Here’s what Johnson, founder and CEO of Geacom, said:
The interest of (Apple and other companies) are aligned to the consumer market, so you can’t subordinate critical healthcare products to consumer needs. The manufacturers of iPads and Android products are not typically within FDA compliance. They are highly hackable…. They can be disease transference devices … they don’t have high robustness as a medical device has to be. The list goes on and on.
And then Johnson levels a charge.
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Show me where Apple has been successful anywhere other than in a consumer market ever – short stints in the education market, short stints in the corporate market and then they failed in every single one. Because they are excellent at the consumer market. They are the best in the consumer market so they will do what the consumers need not what the patients need.
And it is perhaps that desire to meet the expectations of the consumer and to wow them (and to charge more) Apple is famous for updating some of its products within 12 months. That, Johnson says is the biggest risk, and it is more than just Apple or other manufacturers tinkering with their products.
So, if there is a change to the encrypted hard drive, if the access has been changed if there are cyberattacks – look at the Windows platform. How many times they’ve been attacked and people have lost their credit card information, people have had their personal information stolen …OK so if this happens, people lose their money. In the medical world people lose their lives.
See that and more of what Johnson had to say below.
