Along with many others, I’m of the opinion that the iPhone will prove to be a very powerful tool for health delivery. It’s a welcome sight to see pharma companies begin to experiment with it, and Novartis Vaccines has just released a nifty cool called VaxTrak (iTunes link), to help parents keep track of their kids’ vaccinations.
Have all your vaccination records stuffed away in various places? Can’t keep track of what’s coming next? This may solve the problem.
Here’s the description from the iTunes store:
I’ve downloaded it and begun to play with it. First blush – VaxTrak is nice and simple. The interface is completely intuitive, and the app works exactly as it should. You enter in the basic info for each family member, and the Planner then generates all the dates for vaccinations (that should have happened in the past, and pending). You can mark all the ones that have occurred, or “opt out.”
The Spot Shots is really cool – basically, it uses geolocation to show you the nearby stores/pharmacies where meds are available.
Now, you can have all those records (and future dates) handy in one spot. And, it’s free. Awesome.
It should be noted that the schedules and geolocation, etc. are currently only for the United States market. Hopefully an updated version will include country-specific info for other areas of the globe.
What I REALLY like about VaxTrak is that this same concept can be adapted for so many other medical “scheduling” needs. This will serve as a great template for a host of similar applications. Simple. Focused. Intuitive.
Kudos to Novartis Vaccines for rolling this out. Very nicely done.
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No doubt that for busy parents with little kids an application like this one will be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Steve, for sharing this discovery. BTW, how did you know I have a little one? 🙂
Thank you Steve for bringing up this interesting iphone app. Unfortunately, I played around with it for my daughter(2) this morning and am underwhelmed.
For example, app recommends vaccines in the past that my daughter did or did not get. I cannot seem to be able to match recommendations to reality. Also, cannot adapt for fact that I live in Europe and would prefer EU schedule over US.
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Saw this yesterday myself after Brad mentioned it on Twitter and downloaded it.
Like Silja, I was too was rather underwhelmed, as it is very US focused and the European schedules and vaccinations are very different. I was originally planning on recommending it for my brother to monitor his kids vaccinations, but as he is in the UK it will probably have limited utility unless changes are made.
It occurred to me that the geolocations probably wouldn’t work outside the US, but this wasn’t clear at all when I downloaded it from iTunes.
Ok. Let there be no panic. As everything in technology I’m sure this a 1.0 version and new versions will come up in the future. What Silja and Sally are commenting makes a lot of sense and I wouldn’t understand that Novartis would do nothing to fix it, especially being a European company. Don’t you think so?
Based on the feedback that this v.1 program gets here in the U.S., I imagine Novartis will then adapt it for other markets. Gotta start with a trial audience somewhere!
[…] PLUS VaxTrak – Novartis launches a first-version of an iPhone app for tracking your childrens’ vaccinations. I like it. […]
Dear Steve,
who is the developer of this app for Novartis?
Thank you.