As much as every physician would love to have the separation of her or his personal life and work life, the reality is that more and more doctors are blending the two. Requesting to have their work e-mail on their personal phones nowadays has become an accepted practice amongst physicians, and it is more unheard of to not have access to work and personal data on the same device given the recent expansion in the mobile market.
Corey Ackerman, president of Happtique noted in an interview today at the Mobile Health Expo in New York, that the request for physicians to have work e-mail on personal mobile devices was usually greeted with a “get out of my office” response from the hospital IT person in the past. Increasingly, doctors and nurses require real-time patient data, and Happtique is helping to bring healthcare facilities up-to-speed on how to ease this transition.
“We are platform and device agnostic,” said Ackerman. Meaning, Happtique supports all types of mobile devices without bias of manufacturer or carrier. Having partnered with AppCentral, Happtique developed a mobile application store for the healthcare industry to help hospitals migrate into the steadily broadening mobile world.
Happtique is currently in beta, and is soliciting and doing demonstrations for hospitals while looking for feedback on its offering. Ackerman detailed the purpose of the mobile application store as a way for healthcare professionals to organize the way they find and use applications in conjunction with the umbrella organization of the hospital which may or may not be particularly savvy with what’s available for healthcare providers in terms of apps. Ackerman continued, “We help healthcare enterprises manage the apps, not necessarily the devices. We want hospitals to be able to manage mobile applications themselves.”
Happtique has also streamlined how medical professionals can search for apps. With 16,000 apps out there in the healthcare category, which ultimately is broken down into “medical” and “nutrition and fitness,” many useful ones can become lost in the sea of available resources, while many are not necessarily for the professional. Ackerman commented that Happtique’s software categorizes relevant apps for doctors, veterinarians, podiatrists, and other specialized physicians while also separating ones out that are more geared towards the consumer.
While some hospitals still remain out of the loop in terms of what to do with mobile technology and how to harness it, Happtique’s solution will soon ameliorate the busy, hectic lives of those professionals in the healthcare industry, and will help hospitals to get on the speeding mobile train.
Juliana Kenny graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double degree in English and French. After managing a small company for two years, she joined TMC as a Web Editor for HealthTechZone. Juliana currently focuses on the call center and CRM industries, but she also writes about cloud telephony and network gear including softswitches.
Edited by Stefanie Mosca
