Ever tried using your iPhone medical apps with gloves?  Doesn’t work too well.  Although, if you’ve got gloves on you probably shouldn’t be using your iPhone anyways.  The iPad is being touted by many, including us, as a device that could be used with patients at the point of care.  Translation:  Could be used in hospital rooms and procedure rooms that require you to be gloved up.

Since the iPad has a capacitive touch screen your gloves won’t work, and that plastic stylus from your old Palm PDA won’t work either.  There’s a solution to this, the Pogo Sketch, featured in the picture.

The Pogo Sketch becomes an extension of your fingers and works on a capacitive touch screen.  No longer making the iPad or your iPhone inoperable when you have gloves on.  But what if you have to type information on the iPad or the iPhone?  Since your gloved fingers won’t work, using a stylus to peck each letter on the pop up keyboard would be a huge ordeal.

To counter this, iPhone OS version 3.2, the operating system that will be running on the iPad, is rumored to have support for a “handwriting keyboard”, via Engadget.

….and, most interestingly, prototype support for a “handwriting keyboard.” Maybe we’ll see some stylus action on this thing after all.

The above revelation would be significant for the medical community, especially for health care providers who need the ability to write text efficiently with gloved hands or while standing up.  I can imagine myself using this capability to type short notes or even prescriptions for patients while in a standing position in the hospital room.  The alternative would be to use the external keyboard connected to the iPad, definitely more cumbersome, and this would require you to sit down and have desk space.  And as most know, desk space isn’t exactly present in a hospital room.

I’m assuming Apple will not reserve this type of functionality for just the iPad, and will bring it to the iPhone and iPod Touch devices as well.  If they want to make waves in healthcare IT, they would be wise to.

The iPad, Apple’s new tablet, has just been released.  The following are some quick hitting features of the iPad that the medical community should be excited about, and ones we hope will be implemented in the clinic setting.

1. Battery life: Up to 10 hours, we mentioned in a previous post how important battery life is if Apple wants this tablet to be used in the healthcare setting
2. Beautiful screen: The 1024 by 768 screen appears to be gorgeous by many accounts.  This screen could definitely be used to look at imaging.  The Osirix app developers (DICOM station) are surely excited.  I’d love to see how radiology films will look on this.  This beautiful screen would be great for medical textbooks as well.
3. Pricing: at $499, definitely much less than other health care tablets.
4. External Keyboard: Along with battery life, this is one of the most critical components that will make this tablet actually useful in clinic.  I can’t imagine typing on the actual iPad in the clinic.  It wouldn’t be easy to do and in the clinic setting, typos can lead to critical medical mistakes.

We’ll have a more in depth post tonight with how the features the iPad touts can be used in the actual clinic setting.  We’re definitely excited and our medical peers should be as well.

With Apple’s soon to be released iPad re-energizing the tablet market, there has been much speculation on how the tablet will transform personal computing.  However, the tablet has been with us for quite some time. Almost a decade ago, I started testing and using Windows-based Tablet PCs for two cancer centers in Canada. They worked pretty well for what we were trying to do back then, but had definite limitations within the healthcare environment. If Apple’s iPad is to survive in healthcare, let alone transform it, then there are five key deficits Apple must address.

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The rumor mill keeps on churning with the soon to be released Apple Tablet, and now the medical community is supposedly involved.  According to an article by VentureBeat, Apple Reps have been talking to the Los Angeles Cedars – Sinai Medical Center about the potential of an Apple Tablet for medical professionals.

The article goes on to mention one of the reasons why tablets haven’t been universally embraced by medical professionals:

We’ve been told for years that medical professionals were the guaranteed-to-succeed market for tablets. Bill Gates raved about his in 2006. But tablets like the Dell Latitude XT2 XFR, pictured above, have stiffed again and again, in part because of their ungainly laptop-with-a-backwards-facing-display design.

I’ve mentioned in a previous post why the Apple Table could be a huge success in the medical industry, and it’s not because of form factor.  I can’t emphasize this enough.  There is this idea in the tech community that bulky tablets are why you don’t see medical providers using tablets for electronic medical records.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  In my previous post I talk about how the User Interface of potential Electronic Medical Records in a native Operating System made by Apple would be one of the keys to success.

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Rumors of an Apple tablet have been all over the place during the past few weeks. Although Apple is notorious for pulling off clandestine product launches, the consensus appears to be that Apple will launch a tablet early next year. With the $19 billion dollars from the stimulus package set aside exclusively for electronic medical records, it would make business sense for Apple to venture into making tablets that can be used for electronic medical records. So then hypothetically, if we get an Apple tablet in 2010, will it really be used by the healthcare world? Everyone seems to be talking about how great an Apple tablet would be for the medical community, but few are talking about if it would actually be used.

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