Updated! This post has been updated below to include comments from the folks at Epocrates

The excitement and hype surrounding the announcement of Apple’s iPad have subsided for the time being, perhaps just a lull prior to the actual release in a few months. Here at iMedicalApps, we were certainly among the many believers and expected that the iPad could make significant contributions to healthcare, such as potentially replacing the physician’s clipboard or medical textbooks.

However, we did disagree at times on the extent to which the iPad could penetrate the healthcare market, for a variety of reasons. The folks over at Software Advice decided to try to get a feel for what the community at large was thinking through an interesting survey they performed. And for Apple, the results of this survey aren’t encouraging – if you believe the results.

Having spent nearly four years learning how to read medical literature, I decided to try to get a better sense of just how valid these results are especially considering the seemingly conflicting results of the Epocrates survey. Chris Thorman, who authored the article on the survey, was kind enough to correspond with me on details of the survey methodology. Here’s a look at the results and our take on what they really mean.

Continue reading this entry »

It’s probably not an exaggeration to predict medical students of the next decade will not lift a physical textbook. In fact, even ownership of a discrete entity, formerly referred to as a “textbook’, may be a historical footnote. Instead, students may simply rent the chapters they need for a particular course, paying a recurring subscription fee to the publisher for the period of usage. This system could foster innovation and allow for dynamic ebooks that change with standard of care, as I’ll discuss in this post.

Continue reading this entry »

When I was handed my first pager, I was stunned. It looked like the beeper that Will Smith used to flash on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air (and not even the later seasons, I’m talking about the early, crazy outfit seasons!). So I asked why I couldn’t simply use my phone or, for that matter, why we didn’t all use phones. The answer was simple – reliability. The paging system, of which this rather archaic looking item was part, was very reliable. But was that enough? No. The hospital also maintains it overhead paging system just in case. And if that goes down – yep, there’s a back up there too. In health information technology, reliability is everything. And for the iPad, that could prove to be a major barrier to adoption in the medical community as it faces off with other medical tablets, at least if the FCC’s recently voiced concerns prove to be true.

Continue reading this entry »

When I first entered the clinical world, physician order entry and electronic medical records were just concepts to me. As I learned how to navigate the hospital, diagnose everything from the mundane to the incredibly rare (my first patient was a baby with an idiopathic subdural venous thrombosis), and figure out how to treat the sick, I also had to learn how to use those two systems as a prerequisite to doing everything else. The four hours of class didn’t seem to cut it, so I probably spent at least a month trying to get my bearings on how to manage these IT systems. So for anyone who is already familiar with some form of healthcare technology, in this case a tablet, I suspect the adoption cost is far higher than just the price tag. You may be surprised how highly some medical students and residents weigh the notion of learning a new system in their career decisions. And because of what seems to be a particularly high barrier to adopting new information technology in healthcare, anyone interested in whether the iPad will succeed in healthcare should first ask who the competition is.

Continue reading this entry »

Over the last few months, a great deal of time has been expended on the “hot competition” between Apple and Google in relation to smart phones. Much of this interest probably had to do with a partially imagined story of a once close friendship between Apple and Google, founded on their mutual enmity of Microsoft, now fractured on the rocks of competition and greed. While the truth probably isn’t as dramatic, whatever conflict exists is much less interesting than where they may overlap – especially when imagining where medical technology could go and how it would affect medical professionals. As most readers are undoubtedly aware, much of the recent discussion in the blogosphere on this topic (at least before January 27) was about the rapid ascent of the Android platform. The emergent themes were that the open and mutable nature of the Android operating system, the entry of multiple handset makers, and the absence of any restriction on software publishing will inevitably make Android the dominant smart phone platform of the future. The historical analogy given was desktop computing, where commodity hardware and a minimally restrictive operating system made Microsoft Windows the de facto standard, despite many obvious flaws. But, it seems this analogy is flawed and here’s why.

Continue reading this entry »