By Marcia Horn Noyes

Smartphone-toting parents now have a wealth of information at their fingertips. With a simple finger swipe, we can easily obtain the latest movie times, toy reviews, maps to the next play date, restaurant reviews and more. However, the information most vital to our wellbeing, and that of our children centers on healthcare.

As new parents, bumps, bruises, burns, scrapes and breaks can leave us scrambling for answers. Not knowing the best thing to do or where to go when our kids have an unusual symptom or suffer any type of trauma can create undo stress in stressful situations. Fortunately, all of that information is as close as the palm of our hand.

According to a recent Los Angeles Times article “A Guide to Healthcare Apps for Your Smartphone,” reporter Francesca Fritz cited a MobiHealthNews review that noted the availability of close to 6,000 health apps from the consumer market.

One app highlighted in the print version of this article is iTriage® – a free, consumer-based application available for all types of smartphones, including iPhone®, Android™, Palm® and BlackBerry®. Noted for its comprehensive symptom, disease and medical procedure content, the app goes a step further to offer a U.S.-based list of the following healthcare facilities:

• Hospitals
• Urgent care centers
• Retail clinics
• Physicians
• Pharmacies

When the 2010 Olympic Games and World Cup debuted, iTriage added a complete list of British Columbia and South African hospital facilities with urgent care and emergency capabilities.

A Medical Resource We Can Trust

The premise of the recent L.A. Times article begged the question: With so many consumer-based healthcare applications on the market, is oversight needed? That’s the same question recently asked by Canadian Healthcare Technology magazine in an article titled, “Should Medical Smartphone Applications be Regulated? Currently the responsibility for ensuring the application’s accuracy and content reliability rests in the hands of developers, so knowing who created the app you are considering is your first line of defense against faulty information.

With regards to iTriage, two practicing emergency physicians created the application to put more healthcare information into their own patient’s hands. Upon realizing that others needed the same comprehensive medical information, the doctors quickly rolled out the app in strategic parts of the world. Now, the company is addressing the medical resource needs of privatized, nationalized and single payor healthcare systems around the globe.

“We wanted to develop an app that would actually respond to the way parents and users naturally search for information about symptoms and possible causes. We also knew that leading users to the most appropriate facility for that suspected medical condition would alleviate the anxiety that acute care situations often incite,” explained Wayne Guerra, M.D., MBA, Chief Medical Officer for Healthagen, developer of iTriage.

Adding the Missing Piece to Your Health – a Personal Health Record

As a mobile society, we demand information at the tap of a finger and nowhere is this most needed than with our personal health information. A few months ago, iTriage began integrating with Google Health™ personal health records (PHR). Parents can now log onto www.Google.com/health and input their own PHR, as well as the records of each child. Then once the information is entered into the private online database and iTriage has been downloaded onto your smartphone, you immediately have on-the-go access to information like:

• Drug allergies
• Active prescriptions – including, dosage, method and frequency
• Current medical conditions – resolved and unresolved conditions
• Personal vitals
• Past test results – immunization records and more

Once you have a Google Health personal health record for you and your family, you can easily share all or pieces of that information via email with the provider of your choice, when needed.

Your medical information no longer needs to be kept in a three-ring binder or out of reach in a patient file stored at your doctor’s office. Now, a device not much larger than a deck of cards has everything you could possibly require.

Marcia Horn Noyes

As a former television news reporter, freelance newspaper journalist and magazine writer, Marcia Horn Noyes has more than 30 years of communication experience. Her work has been published in the Denver Post, Kids’ Pages Family Magazine, Southern Living, Enlightened Woman, Chicken Soup for the Body & Soul, and aired on CNN and ABC Morning News.

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