Orca Health, a Sandy, UT-based mobile healthcare company has developed, with the help of Harvard Medical School, a suite of interactive mobile apps that use touch, sound, and sight to help physicians explain anatomy and procedures to their patients. The suite of apps are intended to drive better patient-doctor interaction and help patients make more informed decisions on their medical conditions. The company has restructured its main offering as a “professional version” for physicians to educate their patients, compared to prior versions that simply provided information on medical issues for various anatomical locations.

Physicians using the apps can send links, images and animations regarding a particular health condition, packaged into an email intended for the patient. Physicians are also able to highlight and annotate anatomical locations of interest on images for their patients. Patients can then view this content by signing into a secure portal either via the Web or through an iOS device.

The apps offer a learning environment for the patients with certain health conditions grouped together as in Spine Decide, Foot Decide, Shoulder Decide or the Dental Decide apps. Grouping of anatomically relevant information into a focused app helps avoid the deluge of information that can overwhelm a patient when he or she does a web search. Currently, only Spine Decide is available for iOS 7 and the other apps are being optimized and will soon be released for the new operating system.

Link: Introducing Orca Health…