The move is said to be caused at least in part by Apple’s “green push,” according to the London Evening Standard. Apple has taken measures during the past few years to lessen the environmental impact of its products. Those measures include reduced packaging as well as changes in the types and number of components used in its products. While the measures have been seen as effective by organizations like Greenpeace, Apple still faces criticism from environmental organizations in supplier countries, most notably China.

The presence of halogens in electronics is a danger, because when products are incinerated at the end of life, the burning halogen can release dioxins and furans into the atmosphere, which have been shown in studies to be increasing in presence in soil, ground water and people. Dioxins and furans are thought to be carcinogenic in large-enough concentrations, and in fact a 2003 study said that there is no known “threshold below which dioxin will not cause cancer.” Sounds like getting rid of them is a wise move.

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Apple has a medical market manager, Afshad Mistri, who was profiled by Wired in a feature on Monday. Mistri is rare because he has a specific type of business to sell to: health care. Mistri is behind the dedicated iTunes store section for professional health care apps, has organized conferences on how to use the iPad in medicine, and is known to make house calls for medical professionals hoping to set up their organizations with iPads for use in treatment and patient care.

We have talked in the past about how iPads can help hospitals and doctors modernize their record-keeping systems. A program instituted in July offers doctors incentives for using electronic medical record (EMR) software on the iPad, and during our recent RoadMap conference, MIT Media Lab’s director of new media medicine, Frank Moss, said that “everyone’s got an iPad” at the nation’s leading medical schools these days.

Much of the iPad’s use in medical settings so far has been in the form of pilots and trials, but it’s getting ready to take off in a much bigger way. The Veteran’s Administration in the U.S. is looking at rolling out as many as 100,000 tablets across 152 hospitals, says Wired, based on the success of the 1,500 trial iPads it currently has in use. Over 80 percent of U.S. hospitals have similar trials in place, according to recent comments made by Apple CEO Tim Cook, which means that many more could soon take the plunge, resulting in a huge uptick of orders from medical organizations for the generally consumer-oriented device.

IPads can help on both sides of the stethoscope. For patients, they can act as a source of entertainment, providing a way for those who are bed-bound to escape their situation and just browse the web, play games or watch a movie privately and in comfort. Doctors can use them to consult more easily while out of office, and they increase the likelihood of uptake for EMR programs, since they make such records convenient and accessible, instead of a chore tied to a stationary desktop.

Apple’s iPad is a hit with consumers, that much is certain. But its success in health care, which, due to the slower nature of institutional adoption is only now beginning to become significant, might be the key to its remaining the king of the tablet heap. Apple can offer apps, security and a uniformity of experience both within and between medical organizations that Android devices can’t match; if the iPad becomes a tool young doctors just can’t live without, as it already appears to have become in many ways, it could be the go-to slate for healing hands for decades to come.

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The switch has just received 510(k) clearance from the FDA, so Siemens is cleared to begin using it as soon as the system is in place. FDA 510(k) clearance is a series of requirements any new medial devices must meet, by law, before they can be implemented in practice. The clearance opens the door for other health science and service companies to make similar use of the Apple operating system.

Siemens lists increased patient data storage capacity, expandable patient data management capabilities, faster sequencing times and more customizable reporting functions as the reasons for the selection of OS X.

The Genotyping Kit and DNA Sequencing System the new iMacs will be supporting monitors HIV-1 resistance in patients, and resistance to different drugs. The information gathered is used to generate algorithms that allow oncologists to maintain an adaptive treatment routine, designed to minimize the potential negative effects of mutations which leave HIV resistant to specific medicines.

Macs are gaining ground in medical applications, especially when graphics are important. Radiology departments, specifically, are increasingly using a rewritten, FDA-approved version of an open-source program called OsiriX to produce high-quality x-ray imaging. The reason for the growing presence of OS X in radiology is its superior 3D visualization capabilities, and its cost relative to other high-end imaging software solutions.

Apple is accumulating more FDA approvals, greater industry presence, and getting buy-in from medical students in a wide range of fields. It might not be too long before you find an iMac waiting for you at your next regular check up, or before OS X saves your life…and not just in the usual “Vista was killing me!” way.

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