As the debut of the iPad fast approaches, speculation about it is reaching a fevered pitch. Scanning the thousands of articles written about the iPad’s potential, one may walk away thinking that Steve Jobs has just cured cancer, ended global warming, and established peace in the Middle East. Some people are even calling Apple’s latest creation the “Jesus tablet.” While the iPad probably falls somewhere short of some of those lofty projections, it has already done what Apple seems to do best – transformed the way we look at an existing market, in this case mobile computing and the tablet. We’ve talked previously about how the iPhone paved the way for the iPad in healthcare. Again, Apple’s entry into this market has signaled a huge shift in the way users will interact with the tablet and, through it, their environment.  This new user interface has a great deal of potential to change the way physicians deliver care. But perhaps more importantly, it could also have profound impacts on the way patients experience healthcare.

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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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