Diabetes? Hypertension? There’s an App for That!

The iPhone represents an important — “potentially huge” — new marketing opportunity for pharma marketers, as outside developers begin to morph the phone into a diagnostic device for both consumers and healthcare professionals.

According to reporter Rich Thomaselli of Advertising Age, when Apple unveiled its 3.0 software-development kit this spring, the company demonstrated how pharmaceutical manufacturers could exploit the iPhone's external-accessories application to hook up a blood-pressure cuff to the iPhone.

“For Big Pharma, the opportunity is clear, writes Thomaselli. “A consumer who tests positive for high blood pressure or diabetes via the iPhone will clearly be a marketing target for prescription medications or ancillary medical services.”

Recently, LifeScan, a Johnson & Johnson company that makes diabetes products, introduced a prototype for an application that would allow diabetics to interface their glucometers with the iPhone, thereby enabling them to better adjust their medications and diet.

There are already more than 500 medical apps among the iPhone’s more than 35,000 existing apps. An issue that’s certain to arise in the not-so-distant future: the question of when an iPhone becomes a medical device — and thus subject to FDA scrutiny.