Which Tablet PC Will Rule the Halls of Healthcare?

by

Market Analyst

Back in April, when the rumors of a tablet device from Apple were beginning to surface, we wondered aloud if a Mac tablet would become the gadget of choice to integrate with electronic medical records.

Apparently, that concept may soon be a reality. In early January, Venture Beat reported a rumor that Apple reps have been spotted at Los Angeles' Cedar-Sinai hospital, probing physicians about how a tablet (Apple's iPad) could be used in a hospital setting. Meanwhile, tablets were all the rage earlier this year at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show with product announcements from Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Dell.

2010 is shaping up to be the year of the tablet. We want to know which device is best positioned to rule the halls of healthcare.

Survey has closed. Results will be posted Tuesday, February 2nd.
 
  • http://www.anticlue.net Elyse

    An excellent question and of the type that should be always be considered. “How do we bring equipment into the patient rooms and not be disruptive to the clinician patient relationship?”

    This discussion brings to light that most computer equipment from the Carts on Wheels to the old conventional laptop with the keyboard and mouse are invasive and inconvenient in a clinical care setting. Tablets need to be near indestructible, lightweight and contain at least a full shifts battery life. Perhaps the Apple Tablet is our next great hope, replacing motion computing’s c5.

    However, it is important to consider the applications hosted upon the tablet. For the last 18 months, apple has opened up its doors to the computer programming community with the apple iphone development sdk. The iphone allows for 5 touchpoints to be programmed on its small screen. I’m hopefully the Apple tablet increases this amount given the screen size. This being said, it is obvious most of the ambulatory and hospital EMR applications have not been developed to work upon an iphone. Traversing this gap will be critical to the apple tablets adoption in a clinical setting. The citrix hosted application will just be a stop gap measure until this chasm is crossed.

    Looking forward to hearing the results of that survey!

    • http://www.SoftwareAdvice.com Chris Thorman

      @Elyse

      Thanks for the great comment. I agree that a successful healthcare tablet needs to have the battery life of an entire shift. It’s the one feature I keep coming back to that I can’t see how any computer company can make a battery last up to 12 hours without the battery itself being absolutely huge and unwieldy. Maybe Apple will have some interesting work around? We’ll know starting at Noon today.

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