Mobile apps help doctors to not blow a diagnosis

Mobile apps can help doctors that use them order laboratory tests for patients quicker and in the process make a better diagnosis, says new research from Baylor College of Medicine.

“There are increasingly more physician-focused health apps available, and while physicians are becoming more comfortable using these apps, they don’t necessarily know which ones can help with diagnosis because they haven’t been evaluated,” says Ashley Meyer, assistant professor of medicine at Baylor and researcher in the Houston Veterans Affairs Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety .

In a recent study, researchers from Baylor and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention evaluated whether a mobile app improves diagnostic and test ordering decisions of physicians for certain coagulation and bleeding disorders.

“Our first step was figuring out how to rigorously evaluate an app that aimed to improve physician decision-making and then to use our methodology to evaluate the app,” Meyer says.

Baylor researchers selected a mobile app developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that doctors use to diagnose certain bleeding disorders. Baylor signed up 47 physicians from seven different healthcare institutions for the research and gave each doctor eight real and simulated situations to use the app to diagnose a patient with a coagulation or bleeding condition.

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