As you’re walking down the street, you feel a sudden pain in your ear. You’re a few blocks from home, so you step into a coffee shop, pull out your iPhone, and within half a minute find out that ear pain in adults is not usually an ear infection, and is likely to clear up on its own. You read further and discover that a warm cloth, some ibuprofen for pain, and or some over the counter pain relief drops can help for the time being, and that maybe you should call your physician about some antibiotics if it doesn’t clear up in the next few days. You click off your phone and head home with a firm understanding of the problem and what to do about it.
When it comes to accessing health information online, one of the most popular apps is the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) Medical Reference for the iPhone. The application is a free mobile medical encyclopedia that on paper, would literally be a back-breaking amount of information. The brainchild of the university’s own Web Production Manager Marc Laytar, this application has achieved astonishing reach since its July, 2009 release, with an average of over 1,500 downloads a day and peaking at the #3 position on the iPhone’s list of most popular free medical applications.
The app doesn’t contain a slick interface or flashy animations, so what’s the secret to this humble app’s success? Probably the fact that it has more than 50,000 pages of medically reviewed content available in both English and Spanish. Much of the content comes from the proprietary medical encyclopedia available from health-info giant A.D.A.M.
“A.D.A.M. content is a wonderful foundation,” said Ed Bennett, director of web strategy for UMMC, in a phone interview, but UMMC’s app is its own animal. It repackages A.D.A.M’s online content into a mobile-friendly format, and supplements the licensed material with additional in-house productions such as its YouTube videos. By building around a pre-existing base, the app provides a maximum of polish and utility with a minimum of sweat and hassle.
UMMC iPhone App
Running in a clean blue and white frame, the application offers comprehensive information on everything from juvenile diabetes to the nutritional requirements of a vegetarian diet. What’s more, it manages to organize a large amount of digital information in a logical and intuitive fashion. Articles are broken into categories based on utility, such as Symptoms, Injuries, Disease, and Nutrition with links to treatment, complications, and symptoms within each article. Just the right number of links within each article make it easy to navigate to related pieces without it being overwhelming.
The app even features a fascinating “Tests” section, which gives a rigorous rundown of common medical tests a patient might undergo. Maybe the most useful part is the focus on the patient’s experience during a test -including information in subsections such as How the Test Will Feel, and How to Prepare for the Test.
The application, by Laytar’s own admission, could use some tweaking and upgrades. He specifically mentions speed and the look and feel of the application, including graphics and navigational features. We think the app could also benefit from integrating the YouTube videos more seamlessly as the section currently feels like an add-on. However, we think these are small things - the UMMC app is a sterling example of a quality, content rich application that can be of value to many people.
