It’s fair to say almost everyone has bought at least one accessory for their iPhone.  My own collection consists of two items, a simple protective case, and protective case with a built in battery.  I can’t emphasize how crucial my battery case has been, especially when I hit the 20th hour of a 30 hour on call shift and my iPhone’s native battery is about to die.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the development of iPad accessories, and how companies such as Griffin, Gelaskins, Sanho, and others are scrambling to manufacture products as fast as possible.  Time is money in the accessory business, and the iPod/iPhone accessory business is big money — totaling 3.7 billion in 2009 alone.

Medical app developers have already mentioned how they will be customizing their products for the iPad.  Epocrates and Macpractice are examples of two significant players who have already committed to the iPad platform — and there are more.

With that said, there’s no doubt some health care professionals will be using an iPad, whether for reading medical books or for EMR purposes.  So then two key questions come to mind: What accessories do we want to see and whats already out there?  The following are 5 key accessories:

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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.

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It was only a matter of time before partnerships between medical textbook publishers and the iPad development community emerged. One key partnership the Wall Street Journal just announced is between ScrollMotion (app developer) and McGraw-Hill’s Education division, with the purpose of developing e-books for the iPad.  And why does this matter? Because if you’re a medical professional, you most certainly have read or own a medical text from McGraw-Hill.

McGraw-Hill is the publisher of Harrison’s Internal Medicine, Schwartz’s Principles of Surgery, the Case-File series and many more medical texts.  They acquired Apple and Lange Inc in 2007, further expanding their vast medical library.  Many of us know of McGraw-Hill via Access Medicine, the online portal to their large collection of medical texts that is available in almost every academic institution in the country.

Many pundits feel the iPad’s use of an LED screen verse E-ink (think Kindle) will dissuade readers from purchasing the iPad for reading purposes.  The principle argument is the LED screen will cause more eye strain after prolonged use, but the medical community should embrace e-books on the iPad because we read textbooks in a different way than traditional readers.

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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.

Now that Apple’s bombshell has finally been dropped and the world has met the iPad, its finally time to begin separating fact from fiction. Will the iPad boast the same outstanding user interface as the iPhone and iPod Touch? Yes. Will the iPad solve world hunger? Probably not. Will the iPad be a useful tool in medicine, perhaps even transform the way healthcare is delivered or electronic medical records organized? The jury is still out on that one but, admittedly, I am skeptical. Here are a few of the reasons why.

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