Last week I heard a presentation by John Halamka, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Brigham and Women's hospital and Harvard Medical School.  John and his organizations are always ahead of the curve on information technology in healthcare, and he spoke about what device his nurses want to use for the tasks in their days - the iPhone.  He rattled off a list of nursing tasks and said "there's an app for that."

Mobile apps in healthcare will take off, and home care will be part of the trend.  According to a story on the site www.emarketer.com based on research by research2guidance, smartphones will be the most popular devices for healthcare mobile applications in the next several years, followed by tablets. Adoption of both is rising quickly.

Ankota has been predicting these same trends and moving in the direction, as follows:

• Ankota's mobile apps for nursing and therapy notes run on tablets
• Ankota has moved our telephony capabilities for home health aides to smart phones (iPhone is running now and Android is coming soon)Today in the US, the majority of new cell phones are smart phones.  Presently, they're too expensive for most home care caregivers, but this will change, and we predict that the "free" phones that you get from Verizon, AT&T or Sprint will be smartphones by 2013.

Even more important for our industry, is our prediction that healthcare will move increasingly out of the hospital and into the home, making mobile health increasingly critical.

Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital.  Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care.  To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota