Tablet
Motion Computing – One of the iPad’s Competitors in the Medical Tablet World
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.
Five Lessons Apple must learn from current Healthcare Tablets if the Apple Tablet (iPad) is to Succeed in the Medical Industry
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.
How the Apple Tablet (iPad) Could Transform the Way Patients Experience Healthcare
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.
Apple Tablet Will Succeed in the Medical Community Because of Operating System, Not on Form Factor Alone
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.
How the iPhone has paved the way for a quicker transition by the Healthcare industry to an Apple OS Tablet
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.
