More technology in your physician's office.
If you walk into your doctor’s personal office, chances are you’ll see a stack of medical journals on the corner of their desk. This pile, and the periodic email updates from medical journals, are standards in every physician’s life. Medicine is an ever-changing field and doctors know they have to stay abreast of developments to do the best for their patients. Every few weeks they’ll go through that pile of journals and the most recent emails, and thumb through the articles they feel they need to read.
All of this is about to change for your physician forever. Over the last few months, a slew of new apps focused on physicians' need to stay up to date have launched and they are poised to disrupt medical journals like open access has not yet been able to.
One of them, docwise, is led by a typical team. A couple of MIT alums that are now a physician (a general surgeon at NYU) and a healthcare management consultant (a McKinsey alum) have teamed together to develop this flipboard for physicians. Their design mantra is that “physicians are people too” which translates to putting a premium on design. And their goal is to revolutionize the way physicians read journals, and the time seems to align with the other technological innovations that are either here or coming soon.
A practical fix to information overload?
Physicians are overwhelmed with information and seem to have less and less time to read, digest and apply this information to clinical practice. Further, physicians tend to like gadgets and tools and have taken up mobile technologies, in particular the iPhone, iPad and iPad mini at unprecedented speed for devices in the medical field. Perhaps most importantly, the technology is here--innovation that has traditionally been focused on other areas is coming to medicine, including gaming and communications.
The best and brightest of these apps have an opportunity to not only shine but be a disruptive force, and docwise has made a splash. The power of the concept is that they give the physician the opportunity to read multiple journals and news sources in one place, to customize the reading experience to suit themselves, e.g., with custom built topics, and to make connections with other physicians. The interesting thing to note is that the best of these apps are bringing great design philosophy to physicians – something that has been so lacking in the medical field. The sign up process is short and smart. The app is elegant but has a sense of fun (they greet you with a custom salutation on major holidays, e.g., Happy Martin Luther King’s day, John) and takes advantage of the personalization possibilities of today’s technology.
Time for publishers to take their medicine?
Just as Zite and Flipboard were at first enemies of traditional media and now have become their beloved adopted children so too will the docwises of today need to be embraced at some point by the traditional medical publishers of the world. It's all part of the convergence of technology and health. And this is only the beginning...
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