Apple iPad in Healthcare: Pros and Cons

The ScienceRoll blog considers Apple iPad in healthcare: Pros and Cons.  Please click through to read the whole post, but here are the bulleted Pros and Cons:

Possible cons:

• No camera: it means it cannot be used in telemedicine
• No flash: several medical websites use Flash
• No mouse support: it’s not a disadvantage if there won’t be click-heavy applications
• Battery life: It is somewhere around 10 hours which is enough for a doctor working on the hospital but what happens when the iPad gets handed off to the next person? Dying battery can be swapped out for a fresh one in other tablet solutions. Here there won’t be enough time to re-charge iPads.
• It’s too big to fit into a doctor’s pocket.
• iPad is not ruggedized while other healthcare tablets are drop resistant from about a meter.
• No Multi-tasking: it makes it impossible to write a patient report while consulting with a collegue (there are hundreds of examples why multi-tasking is crucial)
• No barcode scanner: it’s used for checking and uploading drugs, among others.
• Such a device should be water-proof and easily disinfected. iPad wasn’t designed for this.
• The iPad has a capacitive touch screen on which gloves won’t work.

Possible pros:

• If there is a company that can get the best out of such a device, that is Apple.
• Probably there will be more and more medical applications designed exclusively for iPad just like there are so many medical apps for iPhone.
• It’s cheaper than other healthcare tablets.
• It was designed to be as user-friendly as possible (a nice advantage of Apple products) so elderly people will also be able to learn to use it easily.
• One scenario might be having an iPad in the hospital as the central database where doctors can upload the information from the iPhones.

Although the screen resolution is modest (1024x768) it does seem like the iPad might be useful for digital pathology.  The completely untethered nature of the device is compelling.  We'll have to see when they become available, stay tuned!

Comments

[smart lipo]

Great point.Apple needs multi-tasking on both iPhone and iPad, but this looks like a winner. Great for patient education, medical images and interacting with EMR, while the iPhone slips into the pocket of the point-of-care worker’s scrubs. You can expect Voalté follow this closely.