Medicine and The I-Pod

There is an interesting article on Time Magazine's website this week about how doctors are using technology to hone their skills. The thing that made it interesting is that it uses the almost ubiquitous I-Pod as the key tool.

Many doctors are notoriously poor at analyzing heart sounds through a stethoscope. Part of this stems from the intrusiveness of listening (don't you just love having that seemingly ice-cold stethoscope head placed against your chest?) and part from the number of times (several hundred) that you need to hear the sound in order to learn and understand it. Dr. Michael Barrett of Temple University came up with a solution. He produced a CD with heart sounds on it, the CD was then loaded onto student's I-Pods, to be listened to repeatedly at their convenience.

This concept holds promise because it can help make better doctors and because a doctor who is well-versed in identifying these problems can make a diagnosis from the sound, thus saving the patient (and their insurer) from expensive, time-consuming tests.

Time's article, which can be found here, was based in a study published in the American Journal of Medicine.