Medical Mobile Browsing

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Steven Chan MD on April 25, 2008 at 11:45am

I think that there is significant potential... in radiology, Osirix (open source viewer) for DICOM images is already working on some iPhones. I think that with increasing mobile network speeds, we will see more apps including MD's checking labs, etc all on their phone.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Paton on April 25, 2008 at 3:13pm

Hi Steven,

Thanks for the info about Osirix. Do you use an iPhone? I bought one a couple of months ago and have been very impressed. It's a big step-change from other PDA phones I've used. My only grumble is the lack of 3G and GPS.

Chris

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Permalink Reply by Farhad Fatehi on April 30, 2008 at 9:32am

Hi Chris,

I have two short video clips from SAP using Hi-Tech solutions, including PDAs, in hospitals. Can I upload them to the Videos section? Is there any file size limitation?

Farhad.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Paton on April 30, 2008 at 12:23pm

That would be great. The file limit is 100mb.

Chris

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Permalink Reply by Dan Cramer on May 2, 2008 at 5:03am

I think even with the advances in mobile browsers it still makes sense to have a more compact type display. Safari on the iPhone is by far the best browser on a phone so far, but you still the major sites tailoring their design to fit it.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Paton on May 2, 2008 at 5:40pm

I agree with this. It's a lot easier browsing a site designed for mobile use than viewing a full size site on a mobile browser. Perhaps the next leap in mobile screen resolution will change things.

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Permalink Reply by Abdullah on May 4, 2008 at 1:55am

Hi chris,

In the hospital were I work IT staff connect physicians PDA to our clinical system so, they are using their PDA for viewing the patient charts, but it's little bit slowly when they try to write an order

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Permalink Reply by Chris Paton on May 4, 2008 at 2:48am

Hi Abdullah,

Thanks for the reply. Do they use the PDA's web browser to access the records? Is it slow because of a slow wifi connection or is it because the PDA web interface is slow?

Cheers,

Chris

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Permalink Reply by Abdullah on May 5, 2008 at 5:52am

Actually, IT staff downloads the software to their PDAs

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Permalink Reply by Olivier Forget on January 9, 2009 at 2:41pm

I'll try to add to this since I had to go through this thought process for my company's product.

I agree with the general consensus that sites need to be adapted specifically for mobile devices. However I think there are more factors that make this an imperative than screen resolutions and browser capabilities.

In my opinion mobile sites need to be able to give the visitor/user what they are looking for in 10 to 30 seconds. The reason for this is that the user may be standing while looking for information, or walking(!) or waiting in line somewhere and prone to interruption or simply in a rush (that's why they're using their mobile device instead of waiting to be in front of a nice big monitor with a full-size keyboard).

The key to letting the user find what they want quickly is to trim down the site's functionality to a minimum. This keeps the site uncluttered and easier to navigate. Plus pages load more quickly.

I don't think higher resolutions and better browsers will change any of this. For a device to be "mobile" it needs to fit in the pocket. In other words, even if the resolutions increase the screen sizes will not grow much bigger than the iPhone's. Higher resolutions will only make us squint more.

In conclusion, I think the new devices are awesome and their advanced browsers certainly make it tolerable to surf the full-size web on small screens, but if your users come to your site / webapp looking for specific data that you can isolate, feed them that information in the simplest fastest mobile-friendly interface you can come up with.

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