An article in the Health Care IT News section of eWeek yesterday explains how Hospital Housekeeping Systems has developed a pair of iOS applications, IQ System and BedWatch, to track patient traffic and exam room maintenance. The article gives some detail on the applications and how they leverage Force.com, but the quote that really caught my eye was

“What we’ve done is leapfrogged this whole client server idea and gone straight to the cloud model, where people record the information straight from their handhelds […] as soon as they hit the Save button, it’s automatically up in the cloud and available for people to report and take action on.”

A neat illustration of the convergence of mobile and cloud computing – mobile devices in the field running native apps, storing data directly in the cloud; everything live and online, allowing real-time monitoring and reporting.

We’ve seen a definite acceleration in this kind of mobile cloud app development with the release of the Force.com REST API, which makes it almost trivially easy to manipulate data in the cloud from any mobile device, while the emergence of technologies for building hybrid mobile applications allow Web developers with HTML and JavaScript skills to join the party. What’s going to be your first (or next!) mobile cloud app?