Is Apple the next Halliburton? During today's iPhone 3GS unveiling, it certainly appeared Apple would like to be. While Apple was hyping its new iPhone operating system, it emphasized how great the iPhone is at all sorts of medical tasks, including a third-party app that fed live updates on a patient's condition to the phone. Presumably, it could store past information as well. It looked suspiciously like my (unqualified) idea of a medical chart. Even if it wasn't actually a medical-chart app, Apple featured it for a reason. It wanted to show that the iPhone could display complex medical data if it needed to.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Washington continued its march toward digitizing the nation's medical records. The stimulus package had $17 billion to entice doctors and hospitals to digitize their filing systems. The iPhone won't help them do that, but it can help doctors take a patient's medical history with them wherever they are, a key benefit of digitization. So let's assume that a hospital digitizes its records through a program that has an iPhone app companion. If the hospital wants its doctors to have portable access to the records, then it will probably choose the iPhone rather than some poorly-designed device nobody's ever used. And that means it needs to buy a batch of iPhones at a few hundred bucks a pop. All of a sudden, Apple has a new income stream. Courtesy of the federal government.