iPhone: the ultimate tool for patient empowerment.

I walk into a patient's encounter today and he is reading Twitter on his iPhone 4. We exchanged Twitter handles and began discussing his diabetic nephropathy.

I ask how his blood sugars have been and he fires up Glucose Buddy and proceeds to show me all of his blood sugar reading since March of 2010. Then he e-mails me the data.

When we discuss blood pressure, he fires up the iPhone again and shows me iBP. When he sends me his home blood pressure readings I get the choice of receiving them as text, html or CSV. Awesome.

Glucose Buddy for the iPhone

iBP for the iPhone

Here's is what the e-mail output looks like:

This was the first patient I have met who is using his phone to document his health. I hope this is a trend because I am sick of patients telling me that they wrote down all of their blood pressures but left the notebook at home. It's nice to see a cell phone do something other than interrupt a clinical encounter.