Orca Health’s Decide apps give patients control over their health

Today we’re taking a peek at some of the apps available for your mobile (or you lucky iPad owners), which aren’t focused on tracking your health or diet, but are concerned with helping people to deal with more serious complications. Orca Health is a specialist medial organisation, which has launched a huge range of apps over the past year that are designed to give patients the knowledge they need to make informed decisions and understand their bodies and health issues in much more depth.

The range features a number of apps including SpineDecide, ENTDecide and HandDecide, that all provide patients, medical professionals and teachers with a lot of detailed information, as well as 3D images, annotations and (most importantly) advice from certified specialists about the next steps that should be taken. The apps cover a lot of different areas of the body and complications, and they’re divided into categories, including Orthopedic, Cosmetic and Senses.

In an intro video on Orca Health’s website, the team explains that many people have an increasingly hard time understanding their medical conditions for various reasons:

“For many people the healthcare experience is broken. Doctors and patients are burdened by time constraints, ever increasing costs, treatment confusion and a lack of clarity and information about their condition. These problems are further exacerbated by a trend towards more patients and fewer doctors.”

Obviously Orca Health has been developed with US patients in mind, but all of its apps and solutions can be used by anyone working in or interested in the medical profession across the globe.

The app from Orca’s range that’s become most popular from the range in the past year has to be EyeDecide, taking the top spot in Apple’s best iPad / iPhone Medical App category last year. It’s divided up into three sections, Anatomy, which provides patients with detailed medical images and annotations, Condition, which describes the problems with certain areas and discusses symptoms, findings and treatment recommendations and finally Find a Specialist, which gives patients the contact information they may need to find out more answers to their problems.

There’s also a very interesting element to EyeDecide (and a number of Orca Health’s other apps), which is AirPlay Mirroring. This means users can stream the contents of the app to a much larger screen and helps doctors who are talking to patients, but also has educational benefits, meaning teachers can show students what’s going on in more depth.

An app will obviously never beat an actual consultation with a specialist, but Orca’s range certainly answers a lot of questions, provides patients with a valuable insight into specific conditions and also acts as a great educational tool too.