27 Aug
Posted by Ted Eytan as Updates
Tags: Apple, apple in the enterprise, iPhone, ipod touch, my own cio
Popularity: 6%
Friends at a very large software company once referred to me in a category they called “influential end user.” I think that means I have no actual authority regarding purchasing decisions (or anything really), but I can convince people to do things (including change health care maybe?).
I think that’s happened recently with the iPhone, as I just received a note from Richard Baron, MD, from the great ABIM Foundation, who said he heard the words “have to” from my mouth echoing in his head about whether he should get one. The “have to” part is about using what are patients are using, and learning about it with them, rather than telling them not to use what we don’t understand.
So, he got one, and maybe a few other people I recommended the iPhone to did, as well. I thought I’d post which iPhone Applications I’m using on my iPhone to give people a head start. Try them out, see what you think. And kudos to all the health care professionals out there who say “yes” to trying new things so they can perform better for their patients.
A little info:
You can get a sense of how I do things from this list, I realized. I don’t have an electronic to-do list, task manager, etc. I’ll post separately about what I do for that. Paper is really good for a lot of things.
What apps am I missing? What do you think of these?
20 Aug
Posted by Ted Eytan as Photo Friday, Updates
Tags: Apple, apple in the enterprise, enterprise2.0, friendfeed, iPhone, location, Photos, Twitter, Web2.0
Popularity: 9%

This photograph is from a session using Tapulous’ Twinkle software, which is a location-aware version of Twitter. This exchange is evidence that the iPhone’s most powerful innovation is not 3G, it’s GPS, which Apple, Inc., has now seeded into the mainstream, just as it did with a host of other technologies, like Wi-Fi.
What is shown here is community being created with complete strangers based on location - this exchange happened when my tweet was broadcast to everyone within a 1 mile radius of the San Francisco airport.
Some of you out there have been expressing your reservations about Twitter, Friendfeed, and the like. Here’s a nice article about both. Don’t be reserved, these are important technologies that will have applications in healthcare. Get your Twitter accounts now. Post your ideas in the comments, as well, please!
And San Francisco, thanks for being nice. You never disappoint.
14 Aug
Posted by Ted Eytan as Photo Friday, Updates
Tags: iPhone, location, Photos
Popularity: 11%
Publishing has been a bit delayed on this blog (but not on my TwitterFeed, I am starting to get how each thing fits together depending on what one is doing), due to the distraction of the beauty of the Seattle summer.
As part of reconnecting with friends who are also iPhone users, I ended up participating in an application-downloading binge. “What does that application with the funny name do? I don’t know, let’s just install it and find out.” I did have the sense to stop and create e-mail aliases for some of them before signing up, but it’s otherwise interesting to reflect on the mob mentality’s ability to modulate concerns about identity exchange. That in itself is interesting - the agility of Apple’s application distribution scheme is going to change a lot about the viral use of software.
What happened next was even more interesting. I have been using Tapulous’ software’s Twinkle for a while now. It’s a Twitter-based application that publishes location information along with lifestreaming events. So, depending on where you are at any given time, it will show you your friend’s tweets, and with the press of a button, anyone who is tweeting around you. The interesting part is that if no one has tweeted recently, it will go back in time, to the location where you are.
While driving across the WA-520, pushing the button revealed the tweets of the people who had been stuck in traffic on this notoriously congested floating bridge hours and days prior. As we crossed effortlessly in the evening, I saw the frustrations of many a driver in the past few days while in the same place. It was a sort of a “kilroy was here” - a twitter signature of a place with meaning to Seattleites (this is the bridge that connects many Seattle residents to work for a very large software company in Redmond, Washington) that would persist.
Of course there’s a tie in to healthcare. Think about all of the places with meaning in the healthcare temple - the operating theatre, the waiting room, the intravenous infusion center, the intensive care unit. If a person had used the Twinkle application in one of those places, any future visitor could pick up the tweets/feelings/emotions of that space. Kind of like an emotional geiger counter. If we did a sweep now in these places, what would we find about these environments? Would it be good news or bad? Will America’s hospitals and health care settings create “no tweet” policies for staff within their facilities? Or would they do the opposite….
What if a health care organization used this feature with intention, and asked patients to tweet their feelings during these meaningful times in the lives of themselves and their families while physically located in these places. The tweets would remain fixed to the GPS location and would be retreivable forever in the future. It’s interesting to think how this could potentially connect patients and families to each other across time and place. Imagine if you could ask, “what were the triumphs and the sorrow that happened in this room before I came into it?”
In the meantime, the next time I am in a health care environment, I will have my location aware device “on” and listening…
If anyone else here has used Twinkle or any other location aware lifestreaming application, feel free to post your experiences here.
22 Jul
Posted by Ted Eytan as del.icio.us bookmarks
Tags: Apple, iPhone
Popularity: 18%
01 Jul
Posted by Ted Eytan as Updates
Tags: Information_therapy, iPhone, ipod touch, Photos
Popularity: 15%

While visiting with friends recently, I was asked something along the lines of what the expectation for healing should be for a friend who twisted his ankle recently.
There happened to be an Apple iPod Touch on standby with a good Wi-Fi connection, so in a few seconds I dialed this up and said, “Why don’t you read through this and see if it fits what you are experiencing, and then decide what your next steps should be.”
I think the iPod Touch is going to be an underdog in Health 2.0 applications….
11 Jun
Posted by Ted Eytan as Photo Friday
Tags: Apple, iPhone, Photos
Popularity: 22%
Couldn’t wait until Friday for this one. Happen to be in San Francisco while the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is going on.
01 Jun
Posted by Ted Eytan as Updates
Tags: Adam, iPhone, Photos
Popularity: 14%
Adam’s new iPhone interface.
21 May
Posted by Ted Eytan as del.icio.us bookmarks
Tags: adherence, blog, blogs, broadband, cell_phones, chcfp, css, health2.0, iPhone, itif, kaizen, kanban, layout, LEAN, penetration, privacy, safety, toyota, wordpress
Popularity: 54%
May 10th through May 13th:
28 Mar
Posted by Ted Eytan as del.icio.us bookmarks
Tags: adoption, Apple, Conferences, disparities, Health Information Technology, iPhone, Leadership, mac, MacBookPro, macintosh, medical_record, osx, patient_centered_care, purchasers, reimbursement, Web2.0, where_we_came_from
Popularity: 91%
A lot of stuff going on this week…
22 Mar
Posted by Ted Eytan as Opinion
Tags: Apple, disruption, iPhone
Popularity: 66%
While in New York City this week, I happened to attend the (first?) iPhone Developer Summit, thanks to a free pass and a little wiggle room in my schedule.
I didn’t go because I am planning to learn Objective C and develop for the iPhone. I went because I wanted to see what the developer community is thinking, and I have to say I was impressed with what I saw. I sat in on a session about the new iPhone SDK and the audience looked almost to me like a group of doctors that are sitting in a room to learn about electronic health records and realizing that their lives are going to change.
There was discussion of the iPhone platform, which has far more computing power and graphics capability than any other handheld that has preceded it, coupled with the fact that Apple, Inc., has made it easier than ever for developers to distribute their applications quickly and efficiently through iTunes. Nothing like this has ever existed on other mobile platforms.
I sensed a tone of quiet resignation coupled with excitement that this will be the next revolution in computing. At the same time, the teaching was about the very basics of developing for the iPhone so it’s very early in the journey. I learned a few things, like the fact that the iPhone you use to develop on will need to be disconnected from the AT&T cellular network, so basically you will need to purchase a phone specifically for development. The SDK requires that you have a Mac running Leopard - you cannot develop on a Windows box. And an interesting revelation that was not well covered previously - the iPod Touch is also a platform for this SDK. This means that an enterprise developer could create internal applications that run off of Wi-Fi, decoupled from phone service. That’s a big deal.
After taking in this scene, I wandered with a colleague over to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, which provided more evidence of a transformation coming. The store was packed beyond all recognition. There was a long feeder line of customers waiting to buy things. And yet the store made all of the products available to customers and potential customers to enjoy at their leisure.
There’s something going on here. Click on any of the pictures to see them full size, and the video below to get a sense yourself.