Apple has recently included a collection of health and medical apps for healthcare professionals, entitled “Apps for Healthcare Professionals,” into their app store. This collection, found under the medical category on the store, is a useful tool for physicians to conveniently find medical-related iPhone and iPad apps.
The collection is divided into various subdivisions of medical apps. These subdivisions are: Reference Apps, Medical Education Apps, EMR & Patient Monitoring Apps, Nursing Apps, Imaging Apps, Patient Education Apps andPersonal Care Apps.
The collection of medical and health apps is a great start to improving app discovery for physicians and healthcare providers. It covers a good range of app types. However, not all medical apps available on the App Store are included in this collection.
For example, the EMR & Patient Monitoring Apps subdivision is missing a lot of the EMR and EHR apps that are available for the iPad and iPhone. After browsing thorough EMR vendors, we came up with a list of EMR / EHR apps that are available on the App Store. We found 28 EMR and patient monitoring apps, whereas the Apps for Healthcare Professionals collection included only 12. This leads to the question of how are apps chosen for the Apps for Healthcare Professionals collection?
While this new app collection is a good start to grouping medical apps for easy discovery, it does have some flaws and omissions that should be addressed. What do you all think of this new addition to the App Store?