Lessons from an iPhone
I admit it, I was suffering from iPhone envy. As an unabashed technophile (i.e., hard-core geek), I couldn't help but be intrigued by all the cool things the iPhone was supposedly capable of doing. When one of your colleagues says something to the effect that she needs to have her iPhone surgically removed from her hand, how can you NOT want one?
But coolness costs money, dang it, so I had to wait until the time was right. Then my cell phone contract came up for renewal, meaning I was eligible for a phone upgrade, and the AT&T store offered me a deal I couldn't refuse. I am proud to say I have now joined the ranks of the iPhoniacs.
Truth be told, this is my first exposure to an Apple product. I've owned a couple of mp3 players, but never an iPod. As someone who knows his way around a DOS prompt, the thought of purchasing an Apple computer has never even entered my mind. But this iPhone has given me a little insight into the whole Apple mindset, and the "one thing" (think Jack Palance in "City Slickers") that is the secret to the company's success:
Their stuff simply works.
It's not just that Apple products such as the iPhone work -- they simply work. Having used Windows PCs and Windows Mobile-based smartphones for decades, believe me, I know the difference. Something as basic as turning the phone ringer off takes me four or five steps with my WM BlackJack; with the iPhone, there's an honest-to-goodness switch on the side of the phone. A switch, for crying out loud!
And rather than Apple trying to envision and create an application for every possible use of the iPhone, they made the radical decision to build a basic operating system and give third-party developers the ability to build applications to run on it. Now, over 40,000 applications later, the result is a piece of technology that is very simple to operate and at the same capable of accomplishing extremely complex tasks.
But the purpose of this blog post isn't to shill for Apple, or even to brag about having an iPhone (well, okay, maybe just a little on the bragging part). In fact, the whole experience has got me to thinking about what a game-changer simple could be as we move toward a nationwide electronic health record infrastructure.
Let's just cut to the chase: the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of EMRs and PHRs is going to be the unwillingness of the users - doctors and their patients - to learn how to use bewilderingly complicated new technologies. New technology isn't going to solve problems that are rooted in not-new people. Solve the people problem, like Apple has done with the iPhone, and the whole process becomes infinitely more doable.
Now that that's settled, time to update Twitter and Facebook using my iPhone Vlingo speech recognition app...does it get any better than this?