The first barrier relates to the device itself. To be used at the point of care, a device must be water resistant. Because of the inevitable fluids found around patients, any point of care device must be water resistant. The device must resist the ingress of splashed fluids, as opposed to surviving a drop into a toilet.

Next, the tablet must be made of materials that withstand the effects of the harsh disinfectants. Devices at the point of care (in hospitals especially, but also in ambulatory settings) must be wiped down with disinfectants to reduce the risk of spreading infections. Common plastics turn brittle and break after repeated exposure to these chemicals. And if such devices are not water resistant, they risk being damaged by disinfectant wipes.

Any point of care tablet must be ruggedized to withstand repeated drops from 4 feet onto linoleum covered concrete.

These three requirements are met by the Intel clinical tablet reference design. Yet this reference design has met with limited success in the market for two additional reasons: weight and battery life. Existing tablets must be light weight enough to be carried for a 12 hour shift. They also need sufficient battery capacity to provide a full shift’s continuous use. (These two limitations are why tablets are deployed on computers on wheels, rather than carried and used like, you know, tablet computers.)

And don’t forget commercial ganged charging stations. Connecting each device into its own wall wart plugged into an outlet is a nonstarter — there’s not enough room in already crowded central stations.

The other major barrier to adoption is application software. For a computing device to be truly nurse carried for any length of time, it has to be smaller than conventional tablets, and it should probably fit in a lab coat pocket. And remember that the average age of nurses is over 50 years — cramming a 1280×1024 or even 1024×768 display onto a small tablet is a losing proposition.

EMR vendors design their user interfaces for full sized displays deployed on desktops or computers on wheels. A number of interesting devices in the past (the OQO and Emano Tec for example) have languished because no one was willing to redesign user interfaces for smaller devices.

Sadly, Apple has almost no foot print in hospitals, or even physician offices. To get IT departments to support another platform with another operating system, a really compelling solution will be needed. Apple could put this off, if they were willing to put in a little extra effort.

As Rob notes in a comment above, a product that meets health care market requirements would also be attractive to other vertical markets – manufacturing, field service, construction, logistics. It is interesting to note that companies like Symbol approached health care *after* penetrating these other verticals. To succeed in health care they had to include resistance to disinfectants.

I currently share my workload between a ThinkPad laptop, and an iMac desktop. But I also have a Powerbook that was my mobile workhorse for 6 years. And without a doubt, Apple currently offers the best hardware & software environment, in both desktops & laptops.

The only gap in their product mix I can discern, is a large-enough tablet-style device. Despite the superior quality and ease-of-use of MacBooks, typing is not my preferred data input method during a patient interview or exam. It can slower than handwriting, not to mention impersonal; unless you can touch-type effectively. I know I wouldn’t want my doctor behind a laptop screen, or constantly looking to one side to see what he’s typing.

Not that there aren’t options in the Mac space. I’m referring to Axiotron ModBooks. But while the base ModBook is interesting, it is neither the most aesthetically pleasing device, and is based solely on pen-based input. And while I am smidgen over the ModBook Pro, it is quite an investment when I can design a complete three-station Mac network for the equivalent price. And in fact, that’s one of my current projects.

I am currently designing a Mac-based small office network, for a pair of physicians in private practice. It will handle patient records, billing, and scheduling (via MacPractice software). However, I feel limited when it comes to the choices I can give the physicians when it comes to note-taking. Asking someone who has used pen & paper exclusively for notes for over 10 years to switch to typing is a bit of a stretch. And I’d hate to improve office efficiency, only to ask the physician to add dictation to his workload (not to mention the technical issues of importing dictations to individual patient records), when his current paper-based practice does not require it.

That’s why I am intrigued by the possibility of a tablet-style touchscreen device by Apple. And when I say tablet-style, I specifically do not mean hybrid tablet-laptops. A single flat-panel with efficient touchscreen input is definitely the way to go. This would be unobtrusive during patient encounters, and the ultimate in portability to boot. Given the choice, I don’t see how a physician would deny something that would be equivalent in bulk to a clipboard with a notepad attached, especially when that same device also gives instant access to patient records as well.

Not to say this type of device doesn’t exist in some forms in the Windows world already. But to be honest, from the perspective of designing an entire office network using Macs, and then asking the physician to use Windows… heck I’d rather ask them to go the dictation route. I am a regular Windows user, and I’m flabbergasted on a regular basis by what those machines are capable of doing, and the time wasted in dealing with issues. The result is that Windows-based machines – as core tools in the delivery of service in an EMR system – are less efficient, and therefore less profitable. Not to mention the fact that they are considerably less secure, and it is essential to eliminate such risks while managing confidential patient data.

It’s been suggested that the premium price on Apple devices would be a burden to the healthcare system burdened by high costs. However, a true cost-benefit analysis (taking into account the cost of IT, security, and stability issues, and of course, ease of use & efficiency) might yield a different picture. It might suggest the increased capital investment costs would be justified by long-term savings in labor (IT man-hours, with associated loss of productivity), and increased efficiencies elsewhere.

To give you a comparison, I’ll take my two laptops. My Mac is PowerBook G4 from 2001. My PC is a ThinkPad from 2008. I regularly used my PowerBook through the end of 2007, when I got ThinkPad to handle a large volume of VOIP/video-conferencing, as well as to eliminate a couple of issues integrating into a PC-based network w/ a large volume of streaming based on WMP. In the six years that my Mac was my principle machine, I had less than five instances where the system had an error that required a reboot – that’ less than once per year. And the majority of these occurred in earlier versions of Apple’s OS X. With later versions, stability of the system is exemplary. On the other hand, in the year and a half that I’ve been using my Windows XP Professional on my ThinkPad notebook, I have had so many system-based problems that I lost count pretty early on. On top of that, we have the less intuitive functioning of Windows, which detracts from efficiency. And lastly, and more importantly, there were my experiences with setting up the laptops with my school’s IT department, which required institutional-class virus protection for any PC. And that’s just to access the network. I’m not talking about machines involved heavily in network-related tasks, or critical services. With the Macs, they didn’t require anything… nothing… at all. I know every computer system has some level of vulnerability, and certainly Macs have their share. But it’s a stark contrast.

Lastly, the migration to Macs for users with considerable Windows experience might be unsettling. But a device that has the ease of use of an iPhone-style interface should eliminate these concerns. And if such a device is the right size, and allows efficient EMR input during patient encounters, it’ll definitely be at the top of my list. I have high hopes for something to develop in the very near future.

I believe the challenge for Apple is not software or anything concerning their heavily patented multi-touch technology — not even wireless inductive charging — as all that is the easy, mostly already solved part we know in iPhone. Instead, it all comes down to size, weight and physical design. If the device ends up being too cumbersome or awkward in any respect, it will not pass muster with the medical community no matter how brilliant it is inside.

Apple has succeeded with this limited effort because its products, principally OS X, iPhone, and its computers, while designed for broader market, are well suited to being adapted for medical uses. And so I think that it would be with an iTablet. An iTablet would be built for a broader market or a summed collection of niche markets but would be well suited to being adapted for medical applications, as you describe, supra. Moreover, if Apple decides to make a full game of it, it could use the iTablet as part of a broad assault on the medical market that would involve all of its line of computers, iPhone, iPod Touch, OS X, and third party applications. Such a strategy, I think, may make sense for Apple: An iTablet that is design for broader markets but which Apple and third party developer can well and powerfully adapt to the medical uses and join with Apple’s other products to provide integrated solutions for a range of useful, if not essential, medical applications.