5 more healthcare iPad apps that I dream of for Christmas

Last Christmas, I wrote about five iPad apps that could potentially beat the arrival of the fat man in the red suit. I've since rummaged around Apple's app store, but for some reason, none of them have yet to appear. Of course, I don't always get things right. But I am persistent, which is why I'm back with five more healthcare finance iPad apps that just might arrive in time for Christmas:


iCharity

Price: Hmmm ... what can you live with?

Details: This app works particularly well for those hundreds of hospitals with charity care expenditures, that are, er, lacking. Plug in the salaries of your C-suite executives and overall system revenue, and the app will provide the sum that should be spent on charity care. Two settings are available: the spending level guaranteed to satisfy the Internal Revenue Service and the spending level guaranteed to satisfy your conscience. Conscience level may be set during the registration process.

 

iHospitalCEOSalary

Price: What we're entitled to

Details: This app was created by the CEOs at the annual ACHE conference last spring who responded to an instant poll that they were underpaid. Input the CEO's education, work experience and hospital size, and the app calculates the appropriate base and supplemental pay--along with the multiple of that pay the CEO believes he or she deserves. A handy lockout feature ensures hospital trustees can't access iHospitalCEOSalary when conferring on pay levels.

 

iERDivert

Price: Priceless!

Details: Getting tired of losing business to that upstart, more consumer-friendly community hospital on the other side of town? This devious little app hacks into the app they use to broadcast their emergency room wait times. Who knew you could wait 46 days and nine hours to get a scrape treated? Additionally, iERDivert posts a pop-up ad for your own hospital just underneath the wait time of your rival. Do it to them before they do it to you!

 

iDrugShortage

Price: The patients whose lives you prolong will consider it priceless.

Details: A group sympathetic to the Occupy movement surreptitiously hacked into the databases for the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest--an organization whose ferocious liplock with big pharma and hatred of healthcare reform isn't touching, but is at least peerless. As a result, you can now access a list of every generic drug that could be in "shortage" over the next six decades. A terrific way to stock your pharmacy just before each reasonably-priced life-saving cancer drug within a 6,000-mile radius mysteriously disappears.

 

iSupremes

Price: Read the tea leaves

Details: Waiting on pins and needles about how the Supreme Court will rule on the Affordable Care Act? Very loosely styled after the Magic 8-Ball toy, this app gives you a new scenario and outcome every time you shake your iPad. My favorite one: A devious clerk feeds the justices marijuana-laced brownies just before they deliberate. It not only redefines the term "High Court" but results in a single-payer system! There's also an outcome even more wildly improbable: During arguments, Clarence Thomas actually asks a question.


Happy holidays, everyone. FierceHealthFinance will not publish next Wednesday, Dec. 28, due to a publishing holiday. I will return on Jan. 4, 2012. - Ron (@FierceHealth)