Apple Tablet Being Developed For HealthCare Industry

http://tinycomb.com/2010/01/09/breaking-apples-tablet-is-for-the-healthcare-industry/

by jasonwilk • 17 years ago

49 34 17 years ago

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.

richcollins• 17 years ago

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

pieter• 17 years ago

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.

jasonwilk2• 17 years ago

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.

lucasvo2• 17 years ago

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.

lucasvo2• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

The iPhone is a cellphone. It didn't replace anything that wasn't there before.

jrockway• 17 years ago

Before the iPhone, there were no paid fart apps.

semanticist• 17 years ago

If you have an iPhone it replaced your previous cellphone - the point is that it's not trying to create an entirely new market with an entirely new kind of device.

axod• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

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.

GHFigs2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

troyk• 17 years ago

Intentional or not, Apple has implied priority with a user interface API that is very well positioned for the health care industry.

iamelgringo• 17 years ago

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.

daniel-cussen• 17 years ago

I don't know, nobody thought they could revamp the cellphone, either.

bmj• 17 years ago

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.)

akamaka• 17 years ago

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

http://tabletpcnursing.blogspot.com/2004/09/longhorn-in-heal...

Mark_B• 17 years ago

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.

spc476• 17 years ago

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.

fizx• 17 years ago

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.

andrewbaron• 17 years ago

Alternate title:

Apple Tablet To Replace Clipboard

ericd• 17 years ago

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

barrkel• 17 years ago

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.

weaksauce• 17 years ago

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

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

transburgh• 17 years ago

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

http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/01/09/apple-tablet-reps-s...

yellowbkpk• 17 years ago

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.

stevenbedrick• 17 years ago

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...).

Apple Tablet Being Developed For HealthCare Industry

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