The iPad’s other life: medical device extraordinaire
The iPad has been a success for Apple in business, apparently in spite of Apple’s lackadaisical approach to promoting its products directly to enterprise customers. But there’s a specific vertical market where the company is clearly making a concerted effort to promote professional adoption of the iPad: medicine.
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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I’m a medical student and I will tell you what every doctor has told me: the size of the current iPad is too big to fit in a white coat pocket. It needs to be 7″ to be carried around everywhere. Then, doctors would pay $1000 easy for such a device.
If you built it, we will buy it.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just add a larger pocket to their white medical coats if that’s their lame excuse. I’d probably have a few custom-made coats for myself to accommodate the iPad.
You have just identified the major issue when working with the medical profession. You have to change to them. They won’t change to you.
Silly. That’s like suggesting that you make a larger pocket in your pants to hold the iPad.
I was with you until the last paragraph. Android in fact could offer more security if there was a company that wanted to do medical industry Android tablets. The issue here is that Apple is one company and there are many companies that sell Android tablets. Saying that it’s better because Apple is one company is silly, since whichever hospital it was could simply go with one Android tablet company. Waste of space.
Too big? Just like the friggin’ paper notebooks and folders they carry around?
IPad’s other other life: restaurant POS systems.
for what it’s worth, Stanford University’s medical school now issues an iPad to every incoming medical student, for two years now – the paperwork reduction alone (for syllabi, textbooks etc) has been quite a hit…
Jeff’s right about the size. I used to work in a hospital. Doctors and hospital staff in general have a lot on their mind. They need a gadget that slip without thinking into a white coat pocket. Anything that has to be put down will get forgotten, raising serious issues with theft and patient privacy. And medical software developers are just going to have to learn to adapt their data display to various sized devices.
Apple also needs to create rough-environment versions of their products. Anything used in a hospital gets a lot of abuse and needs to be sterilizable. It can’t quit working when dropped during a life-or-death code.
It’s silly for the design types at Apple to resist this need for ruggedized versions. All that means is that users cover Apple’s intended look with a case that often looks ugly and is always heavier and larger than need-be because the iDevice has to have two cases: Apple’s and one that gives adequate protection. Apple needs to put its industrialized design skills into creating products that can take abuse.
Panasonic has an answer. It’s not the answer, but it is one possible solution, which is their new offering of the ToughPad. It’s a true ruggedized IP56 certified android tablet. It’s going to be shipping in the coming months and from the mouth of the president of Panasonic Computer Solutions, it’s to be shipping with Google’s new tablet OS – Ice Cream Sandwich.
This tablet is a little bit heavier than the IPAD, mainly because it is ruggedized but not that much heavier. There is also a smaller version of the Toughpad due out sometime later in 2012 or 2013.
It’s already an interesting topic of discussion amongst the law enforcement community as many cities/municipalities already deploy Toughbooks as part of their fleet. Many have expressed interests in having a tablet platform to Panasonic. However, the software industry for law enforcement, much like the medical community, is far more resistant to change as these systems cannot simply be uprooted and/or moved off as many of the original developers/vendors do not exist anymore.
Imagine asking a carpenter to update his “hammer” or “saw” every 6 months. That’s just not going to happen.
Apple is substituting its consumer expertise for patient acquisition in pursuing healthcare. Apple takes IT consumeritization into the high margins of healthcare. Healthcare has “deep pockets” for upgrades across hospitals and medical groups, but also there is patient demand subsidized by aggressive insurance companies. An example is United Healthcare insurance or UHC that aggressively uses insurance claims to cross-sell other benefits for remote nursing and prescription management. UHC provides patient profiles and records to inContact that has a platform for work-at-home nurses to telemarket members. The issue for Apple will be privacy and opt-in similar to the Carrier IQ spying on smartphones. Also, Verizon like Apple is making its healthcare pitch at this week’s mHealth Summit in Washington D.C. by partnering its 4G LTE with Wellpoint and Zipnosis. Verizon’s 4G LTE is unreliable for medical purposes. I have a cardiac defibrillator and using the same cellsite Verizon reverted to 3G CDMA after the first 30 days or customer satisfaction period. Verizon refuses in-store support for LTE and refers customers to their Albuquerque call center. Verizon technical support said that its LTE is only for short interval connections and downloading content provided by Verizon. And Verizon does spam with gaming and entertainment downloads in so-called network updates. Verizon LTE is for gaming and entertainment, and should not be at the mHealth Summit in Washington D.C.
I agree with your thoughts on the iPad. Security is a concern for the healthcare executives, yet they need to quickly find a way to support their doctors. The younger and “hip” doctors are growing up in the social media age and are agile and used to having content and information at their finger tips. The hospitals and healthcare groups that provide the doctors with the tools and network access, will be the organizations that win in the long run. I’d enjoy having a conversation around how we’re addressing medical device security for our healthcare clients.
I am an IT professional working for IT Doctor Support. I have seen the increased usage of the Ipad in Medical Practices. These devices are mainly used to facilitate the use of Electronic Medical Records retrieval.
I speculate this will increase exponentially as the use of EMR becomes more prevolent and physicians become more comfortable with the technology. Many which already use Iphones to support their practice.
IT Doctor Support – Ben
http://www.itdoctorsupport.com