AT&T Industry Solutions Practice Manager for Healthcare John Hamilton and Senior Healthcare Marketing Manager for Mobility Product Management Tammi DeVore provided details on hospital wide launches of iPhones at four care facilities in North America: Doylestown Hospital, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; and Mt. Sinai Medical Center (in Toronto, Canada). While we have written about each of these hospitals' iPhone adoption in the past, Hamilton and DeVore offered up more specifics:

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has created a HIPAA compliant web portal that is optimized for the iPhone's Safari web browser. Unlike most iPhone apps, this deployment is really just a website optimized for the iPhone, as opposed to an application hosted on the phone itself. The portal includes access to patient information and consolidates information from 30 hospital systems for 8,000 of Cedars-Sinai's workers -- each of whom is now an iPhone users, according to AT&T. Hamilton noted that perhaps most remarkable, the 8,000 users conduct about 20,000 sessions on the mobile portal everyday.

Doylestown Hospital's workers use iPhone to access corporate email; access a HIPAA compliant web portal with patient information, lab results, images and other clinical data. The hospital has reported that Epocrates and Medscape are now widely used by their care workers for diagnosing and clinical support.

Mt. Sinai Medical Center recently created an iPhone app in-house for its care providers called VitalHub. Hamilton noted that Mt. Sinai used their own staff of developers who had only developed for Windows Mobile devices in that past. VitalHub, a HIPAA compliant app, hooks into 30 of 66 applications that clinicians were already using at the hospital. In other words, nearly half of the hospital's clinical applications have been mobilized for the iPhone platform. Hamilton said that Mt. Sinai's CIO told him that all of the center's workers are using iPhones and not iPod touch's because the touch had limited capabilities when it came to "push" services, which are sometimes key for alerts.

AT&T also highlighted a number of apps for clinicians and categorized them in a way that is beyond the simple "medical" and "health & fitness" categories used by Apple's AppStore: Medical Reference, Diagnostic Tools, Education, Patient Records. For each category, AT&T used an example application: Epocrates, AirStrip OB, Modality's Netter's Anatomy, Allscripts Remote Access, respectively.