Yes, indeed. The MMS message that she had just received featured a photo of the newborn baby, a few minutes after he was born, with the following text attached, "This is Jen-Ai Hospital Baby Photo Messaging Service! Please welcome Heather & Ciro Correia's newborn baby, Dylan Connor Amandio Correia! If you would like to send them an E-card, please go to: http://www.jah.org.tw/english/ecard.asp or please visit us at: http://baby.jah.org.tw/webnursery/english.asp for additional photos, in the next few days."

　　Jen-Ai Hospital in Taichung County, Taiwan is claiming to be the first hospital in the world to introduce this free service to all parents who have their baby at the hospital. Celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, the county hospital is looking for new and innovative ways of reinventing itself by offering services that are not yet available in hospitals from other parts of the world.

　　Mark K. Chan, Program Director of Jen-Ai Hospital International Patient Center (JAH IPC), explains, "We were the first hospital in Taiwan to offer our Baby Web Nursery service, more than 2 years ago, where a webpage with basic information and picture of the baby is uploaded onto our hospital website within 72 hours of the birth. But after many hospitals in Taiwan started to offer this service and receiving several requests to create the webpage 'as soon as possible' (and we were able to cut the time down to less than 1 hour), I started thinking that there must be a faster way to send a photo of the baby to friends and family members. And the solution was - MMS messages sent by camera phones."

　　Chan adds, "Before this project was implemented, friends and family members needed to wait and visit our hospital website to see the baby's picture, but with the MMS message, they can now see the photo almost instantly. With more and more people owning a camera phone with MMS function, the time is right to launch this project, so that it will encourage other hospitals in the U.S., Europe and Asia regions to offer this kind of free service to all parents who have a camera phone in their respective countries. But for parents who don't own a camera phone, we offer yet another service, where the baby announcement is sent via SMS text messages. All of these services are available, after obtaining the informed consent forms from the parents."

　　Designating the 24-hour English Information Hotline number to the picture phone, the International Patient Center (IPC) has been utilizing its mobile phone by taking advantage of other functions such as the Short Messaging Service (SMS) text messages in taking appointment requests, sending confirmations and reminding international patients about their medical appointments. Even telephone interpretation by 3-way calling and conference calls has been arranged for urgent situations or emergencies.

　　IPC is also exploring other usages of the MMS functions that have been employed in other countries, like the U.S., U.K., Denmark and Japan, where pictures of X-rays, CT, MRI scans, injuries caused by car accidents, etc. are taken by camera phones and sent to specialists in the Radiology or Emergency Departments for their professional opinion. In fact, IPC has received MMS messages from its foreign patients with photos of skin rashes, cuts and bruises, for second opinion from doctors in the Dermatology and Plastic Surgery Departments.

　　According to BBC, it was estimated that by the end of 2004, worldwide camera phone sales reached 159 million, with mobile phones with built-in camera projected to take up to 70% of the global handset market in 2008. And in Taiwan, DigiTimes predicts that 7 million mobile phones are expected to be sold by the end of this year, with more than half being camera phones. With the advancement of mobile phone technology, including image resolution of more than 5 mega-pixels, faster data transfer, bigger storage capacity, higher zoom capability, etc., various usages, especially in the healthcare setting, is anticipated in the near future.