

Apple Tablet Being Developed For HealthCare Industry - jasonwilk
http://tinycomb.com/2010/01/09/breaking-apples-tablet-is-for-the-healthcare-industry/

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GHFigs
_What's my intel? My Dad plays golf with Cedas-Sanai hospital execs, who say
they have been getting frequent visits from Apple about a new device in the
last 6 weeks_

So? How on earth do you conclude it's being "developed for healthcare the
industry" from this? It may be developed with the industry _in mind_ , as
surely any tablet/PDA/smartphone in the past decade has, but that doesn't even
remotely imply priority.

~~~
TomOfTTB
Yeah, I'm going to call BS on this. I work in the Mental Health Industry and
I've gone through the hurdles that exist to using iPhones in the health
industry and they're significant. From documentation to security of data it
would take a lot of effort on Apple's part and that effort would be contrary
to their established culture (Government likes open solutions from companies
that bend over backwards to accommodate)

I have no doubt it's something Apple's considered. The one place Microsoft's
TabletPC has gotten any kind of traction has been in hospitals. But Apple's
culture isn't conducive to meeting Federal guidelines and that's not something
that can be changed on a dime.

(Also, the sheer fact that he mentions the Obama administration shows this guy
doesn't know much. Government sadly doesn't move that quickly so rushing to
market with a tablet would put it out there years before any action the Obama
administration takes would go into effect)

~~~
huangm
The Obama administration has already passed legislation for incentive payments
to hospitals and doctors that adopt electronic medical records starting 2011,
so they are not as slow as you think.

~~~
zaidf
Indeed. My dad just started a new practice and he was inundated with companies
wanting to offer their "electronic" solutions that will make him eligible for
gov money.

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jacquesm
Tablets have long since been marketed 'vertically', there are even tablets out
there today that have been modified to better function for some applications.

For instance (but certainly not limited to), insurance appraisers, real estate
brokers, delivery services,restaurants and yes, the medical industry.

But not in all cases were these successful.

Apple has become very much a mass market producer, I fail to see why they
would want to specifically target a niche with their product.

More likely than not it will simply be a general consumer device that gets
'adopted' by verticals.

Another big issue with using a consumer device for a vertical market is theft,
there had better be a very solid way to make sure that those tablets laying
around in hospitals don't grow little legs all by themselves.

Anything in a hospital that is of pocket size, valuable, not nailed down and
guarded by a rotweiler tends to walk out.

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iamelgringo
I moonlight in health care while I bootstrap my startup, and I've heard people
touting tablet PC's for this industry for years. The few inroads that I've
seen that form factor make has been in our glucometers which are essentially
modified Palm Pilots, and our lab technicians are now using a similar gadget
to receive lab orders and scan bar codes on patient wrists while drawing lab
specimens.

I was in a supervisory role last winter, and I really tried to make a tablet
PC work for me. In theory, the idea would be great. I could have access to all
the info on all the patients and all the individual units while I wandered
around. The killers were lack of battery life, spottiness of wireless
connectivity and weight of the tablet.

Our hospital just built a new $200 million facility, and even though the
wireless connectivity is much better, we now have PC's at every bedside. (and
we still generate reams of paper charts on each patient). And, our supervisors
still walk around with a clipboard full of paper.

I'm not buying the whole tablet PC in health care idea. Even if Apple
developed it, I don't think the industry would buy it.

~~~
bmj
_I'm not buying the whole tablet PC in health care idea. Even if Apple
developed it, I don't think the industry would buy it._

The tablet/slate is making serious in-roads in clinical/pharmaceutical
research. How do I know? My team just released a new tablet product for
collecting patient reported outcomes, and it is selling well. Of course, this
is quite different than your situation, I think, but clinical research
(particularly electronic data collection) is an always-growing market. If,
indeed, there is any truth to the rumor, that could mean that Apple will treat
the tablet more like a "computer" and less like the iPhone--meaning
users/developers have far more control over the device. (Initially, my company
was very excited about the iPhone, but there was absolutely no way we could
make Apple's business model work for us.)

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aaronblohowiak
Apple wouldn't have to develop anything in particular in order for an iphone-
like tablet to be supported by the third-party medical software providers to
want to develop for it, I imagine.

Disclaimer: I do some contracting work with corporations named in the post.

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stevenbedrick
There's a long history of tablet form-factors being used in healthcare, and
the docs I know who use them swear by them. The article mentions the Motion
C5, which is pretty cool from a hardware standpoint, and is pretty decent to
use, from what I've heard... also, the Marshfield Clinic network in Wisconsin
has been using tablet PCs with modified EHR software as their standard
clinical workstation for years, and has put together a pretty amazing system
built around tablet computing.

The tablet-and-touch-screen form factor has some interesting healthcare
properties- the most important, IMHO, that a well-designed touch screen UI can
be used easily by people in a hurry who are wearing gloves. From what I've
seen, most tablet PCs just use modified versions of Windows, which means lots
of small and fiddly UI elements, and therefore falls short of meeting this
potential UI sweet-spot. If Apple can get an iPhone-style UI with nice big
buttons, task-oriented interaction (as opposed to document-oriented or window-
oriented), etc. working on a gadget that can be easily sterilized/autoclaved
and that has a screen big enough to display significant amounts of data, they
might have something that would work really well in a medical context.

The problem, as always, is that people (especially docs and hospital IT
admins) are _really_ resistant to change, and EHR vendors resist true
interoperability with the passion of a thousand burning suns. But, hey, the
iPhone's remarkable success has demonstrated that building a gadget that
doctors & nurses actually _want_ to use is a good way to force management to
support it (at least, it has at my hospital), so there is precedent for Apple-
driven bottom-up change in healthcare IT (now _that's_ a sentence that I would
never have imagined writing four or five years ago...).

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pieter
I think the conclusion ("Apple tablet is for healthcare industry") is a bit
too eager; I can imagine Apple pitching the idea to healthcare professionals
as they have a clear usage pattern and apparently already use similar devices,
but I find it hard to believe Apple would put these professionals above the
average consumer, let alone that they would develop a product entirely for
this industry. Apple is foremost a consumer-oriented company, and I can't
imagine them changing course now.

~~~
jasonwilk
of course it will be both a consumer and professional device, but Apple just
has a sure win for the device with a part of an industry that needs to get up
to speed. This puts an end to the 'the world doesn't need a tablet' talk.

~~~
lucasvo
I agree with you. Though I would still say, the average consumer doesn't need
a tablet. The UPS guy could use a tablet, you could use a tablet for grocery
shopping at the super market, a mechanic could use it to diagnose a car...

but for reading the newspaper or surfing on your couch, I doubt that it's so
much of an improvement over a notebook.

~~~
jey
> but for reading the newspaper or surfing on your couch, I doubt that it's so
> much of an improvement over a notebook.

Reading on my Kindle DX is completely different and way better than reading on
my 15" MacBook Pro.

~~~
GHFigs
How much of that is the form factor vs. the display?

~~~
jey
Almost all form factor.

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richcollins
I just had a physical. My Dr. sees some Apple employees and mentioned that
they were hyping its transformational value to him.

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lucasvo
I think it is a very valid point. A tablet makes sense for the medical
application but they have been around for years on the consumer side and
nobody really used them. Why not? Surfing hacker news is cool on a tablet in
my bed, but writing this comment while I'm in my bed would be impossible with
a tablet. Same thing about most of the other browsing, text input on a table
it not very practical. (I used to own an HP tablet pc)

The form factor is also quite big, it's not something you're going to put in
your jeans. And when you have to carry it around in a backpack, most of the
people will probably just take their notebook because when it comes to serious
work, emailing and actually creating content a keyboard is a lot faster.

The tablet can't be much smaller than the macbook air and even if it is, I
think a lot of people would go for the MBA.

For consuming media, a tablet is great, but epaper is even better and we
haven't heard any rumours about epaper being used. Now for music you already
have an iPod, and just for watching movies and reading blogs in color, I think
is not enough to convince people to buy another device.

Remember a tablet would completely change the way people behave, the iPod
replaced the walkman, the iPhone replaced a cell phone. A tablet is neither
replacing an iphone nor a notebook, so at a 1000$ price tag, I think the value
it brings is not enough.

~~~
jacquesm
The iPhone _is_ a cellphone. It didn't replace anything that wasn't there
before.

~~~
axod
I don't consider my iPhone as a cellphone, and don't use it as such. It's my
pocket macbook. Which didn't really exist properly before.

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yellowbkpk
I work for a company that has been trying to do something like this for at
least a decade. Nurses and doctors are extremely reluctant to change -
especially when it comes to something as important as ptient records. This is
for various reasons (#1 being that no vendor has really tried to do it
correctly), but by now the healthcare market is so set in their ways that it's
going to take more than Obama's money and some Apple engineering to pull off
the change.

The problem is that no one offers a complete system that "just works" from end
to end. Think of how easy it is to sit down at a Mac and figure out how you
get on the web and print a document. That same ease of use needs to apply to
the entire patient monitoring chain: data acquisition, patient records, ICU
visits, etc. Right now the market is saturated with companies too lazy to do
it all themselves so they buy smaller companies that have done each piece well
and spend billions and years trying to integrate it all. There is huge money
spent, but only because the system has no other choice.

It would be a great sector for startups if you knew how to deal with the FDA.

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transburgh
An update from VentureBeat - Apple tablet reps spotted at LA hospital

[http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/01/09/apple-tablet-
reps-s...](http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/01/09/apple-tablet-reps-spotted-
at-la-hospital/)

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akamaka
Just like MS developed Vista for healthcare? See this link from 2004:

[http://tabletpcnursing.blogspot.com/2004/09/longhorn-in-
heal...](http://tabletpcnursing.blogspot.com/2004/09/longhorn-in-
healthcare.html)

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barrkel
I can see how squeezing a whole apple into a tablet is quite impressive, but
I'm not sure that keeping the doctor away is in the healthcare industry's best
interests.

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fizx
Don't have anything to relate about the truth of the rumor, but my dad is a
family doctor who has been begging for a clever tablet for medical forms for
about five years now. The two key wins for him are (1) not having to fetch and
replace physical charts, or find a terminal to look up info, and (2) the
benefit of a really good autocomplete system that could let him write down a
common diagnosis in a couple taps.

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spc476
It's about time. The Apple Newton was just getting popular with doctors just
in time for Jobs to pull the plug on that particular device (sigh). Ten years
later and Jobs finally gets to put the Newton ][ out to market.

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Mark_B
Naturally, the couch-potato YouTubers will appreciate the features, but
assuming that the Apple Tablet "just works" and does what it needs to do with
minimal frustration, I don't see why the idea would be so far fetched.

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weaksauce
I will say that I scooped this one a bit ago here on HN...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023782>

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andrewbaron
Alternate title:

Apple Tablet To Replace Clipboard

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ericd
Making an electronic clipboard may be the only way to get doctors to replace
paper clipboards and start saving their notes electronically.

