TECH TALK

Want Your Own App?

The creators of Eye Handbook release Doctor App to bring your practice to the smart phone.

BY ERIN MURPHY, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

How many eye care apps are on your phone? Odds are, you have Eye Handbook from Cloud Nine Development, a company formed by two ophthalmology residents in the iPhone’s early days. Although those residents have moved on in their careers, they continue to create new eye care apps. Their latest development, Doctor App, helps move ophthalmic practices into the mobile environment.

EYE HANDBOOK

“When we were residents in 2008 and the iPhone was new, we wanted to build an app for eye care,” recalls Ken Lord, MD, FAAO, a vitreoretinal specialist at Retina Associates of Southern Utah in St. George, UT. His partners at Cloud Nine Development are Rohit Krishna, MD, a glaucoma and cataract specialist at Sabates Eye Centers in Kansas, and Vinay A. Shah, MD, a vitreoretinal specialist at Dean McGee Eye Institute in Oklahoma City.

Cloud Nine released Eye Handbook at the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting in 2009. The app had 10,000 downloads in a few days, which to date has grown to more than 1 million downloads internationally and about 20,000 to 25,000 active users on both iPhone and Android devices, according to Dr. Lord.

“At the time, there were very few eye care apps. Eye Handbook was the first one with a comprehensive approach — everything from mobile testing to medications to coding,” Dr. Lord says. “It did well, we received funding and continued to improve and build a good niche following with repeat users. It continues to be popular with new doctors, for example, because it has a great deal of reference tools. Eye Handbook has been in the app store for 5 years, while the majority of mobile apps only have about a 1-month lifespan.”

Doctor App (Cloud Nine Development) is a platform that lets doctors create a smart phone app for their practice.

DOCTOR APP

Cloud Nine Development’s newest eye care app is Doctor App, a platform that allows doctors to create a smart phone app for their practice. With its Lite and Premium versions and an optional foreign language add-on, doctors can create their own content or have Cloud Nine consultants develop it.

“Doctor App is the practice’s extension into mobile space, just as the website became everyone’s computer presence 20 years ago,” Dr. Lord explains. “The app has a static shell, which users fill with content customized to their practice. Doctors buy the app and subscribe, and patients download their doctor’s app and use it for free. We handle all of their communication with Apple and Google to get their customized app into those stores.”

Once users set up their app, they can reach out to patients and referring physicians with information about the practice, the physicians, the conditions they handle and current research or studies. Doctors and their staff members can use messaging tools for referrals, patient reminders and news alerts. Patients can make appointments, request prescription refills, ask questions, refer friends, view educational materials and videos, and set up medication reminders.

For practices active in marketing and practice building, a mobile presence that provides this multifaceted functionality can be a very powerful tool. NRP