Mobile

Doctor takes collaborative approach in developing new smartphone apps

By Rosie Lombardi

Many doctors have bright ideas for smartphone apps but don’t have time to pursue them. Some tech-savvy doctors are taking the lead in harnessing this gold mine of sources. Dr. Neil Paul (pictured), developer of iCalcRisk, iMCQ, A2Z of Dermatology and a new app that uses the iPhone 4’s gyroscope to track motion, takes a community approach to developing useful apps.

Paul says he stumbled into iPhone app development by accident, not design. A full-time GP in a primary care medical clinic in Cheshire, UK, Paul is also the IT leader for the medical practice that includes 15 doctors.

His interest was piqued when the clinic worked on a project to develop cardiovascular risk screening software in 2008. “I ended up looking at the algorithms the programmer wrote. Just to see if I could do it, I bought a book on Amazon about programming iPhones and developed iCalcRisk.”

iCalcRisk is a simple slider-based primary cardiac risk calculator based on JBS2 guidelines developed by the British Cardiac Society rules, and is available free of charge at the Apple iTunes App Store. Paul says he used many of the slides and other information used to develop the clinic’s software as the basis for the app, and he also included ideas contributed by the partners and medical students in his practice.

Paul then moved onto a new project. A colleague with an interest in dermatology suggested a guidebook for clinicians would be useful. Word quickly spread among his colleagues that he was working on another project. They told their colleagues, and the circle of collaborators widened.

“People came out of the woodwork saying they had pictures, graphs and other information to contribute. Most of the people I spoke with were GPs, but we didn’t want to write an authoritative textbook, just a guide for clinicians. It turned out one had been already been written.”

Paul used the award-winning “Quick Reference Atlas of Dermatology” by Dr Ian Williams & Dr Vivienne Ankrett as the basis for his new app, and added some exercises, pictures and other information his colleagues contributed. Called A2Z of Dermatology, the app features 115 different diagnoses, all with zoomable, full-colour high-quality photos and brief explanatory text. Over 7,000 copies of the app have been sold on iTunes at about $2.99 a pop.

He says the feedback he gets from doctors around the world who’ve downloaded his apps is a mixed blessing. “The constant demand for new features is very interesting to me as a developer but it’s difficult to cope with, because we want to get new apps out but we also need to keep the old ones up-to-date.”

He has more projects in the mill, and two are close to completion.

One is a mobile version of MCQ (multiple choice questions) apps for medical students. “There are only a few big companies doing guides in electronic format. A lot is now Web-based but I got an idea from one of our students one day. He was loitering in the corridor waiting for a patient, and I thought a mobile MCQ app would be useful to students so they could study on the fly when they had small bits of time on their hands.”

Once again, he received many feature requests and people coming out of the woodwork with contributions. “Many doctors say they don’t have time to write an article or a book but they do have useful input. We’re also working on the idea of sharing income from these projects. Profits aren’t huge but it’s nice to get some profit from the work you do. We’re not a big company, just regular doctors who want to get involved but don’t have a lot of time, so we take a community approach.”

The other project is quite new and goes beyond using the iPhone just to provide information or to monitor patients, but to use it as part of patients’ therapy to make them better.

“We’re working on an app for using the iPhone to treat tennis elbow and other conditions that require exercise. The new iPhone has motion detection capabilities. It has a gyroscope, compass, and accelerometers, so it knows the speed and angle of an exercise and can detect if they’re being done properly. It’s an exciting new area for medicine.”

Although this approach lends itself well to musculoskeletal conditions, Paul says it might work in other areas. “It could be used to measure the patient’s chest inspiration and expiration in pulmonary rehab. The level of detail is quite precise in the iPhone, and people always have their phones with them.”

Paul says a major benefit of his development sideline is meeting new people with interesting ideas. “I meet many doctors who tell me I’ve always had this great idea but I never knew who to speak to, to get it going. A lot of people are interested in getting involved in medical apps, but there’s no easy way for them to develop their ideas.”

There’s a window of opportunity today for doctors to get involved, but it may slip away in the future, he says. “Innovation is difficult at large corporations, and I like to think the small guy can get involved. The problem is, as the complexity grows with iPhone, iPad, different operating systems, it will become difficult for amateurs to keep on top of that. This will break the original wonder of the iPhone: Anyone could pick up a book and learn how to program it.”

Posted July 22,2010