Healthcare Wants a Tablet, But Not Apple’s iPad
6th February 2010
Can’t say that I blame them.
In terms of medical software selection, the iPad lags far behind virtually every other tablet on the market. Despite having over 5,000 medical apps immediately available for download through Apple’s App Store, none of those apps are a functional EMR system or even remotely close to one. The vast majority of EMR software on the market today will not run on a Mac OSX operating system. Most require a Windows-based operating system to function.
I don’t see apps per se as a long-term problem. Now that the iPad is an actual product, this situation will change, perhaps rapidly — how may iPhone apps were there available when it first came out? But, baby, look at them now.
As sometimes happens with Apple, though, they’re getting into a market that Windows apps have come to dominate; if Apple intends to be a presence in the medical market, it’s going to have to do some fancy dancing to get up to speed.
February 7th, 2010 at 19:39
Based on Peggy’s experience with medical practice management software, I’d still go with the iPod/iPhone comparison. Windows may have been there first, but nobody really likes the choices available. They range from adequate to genuinely terrible, which means that the first entrant to come up with something that people like wins. I know nothing about emergency medicine software, but it doesn’t seem likely that it’s dramatically different.
February 7th, 2010 at 20:15
Well, the problem is that the iPhone, or any other phone, is like a television – it’s the presentation layer on top of an infrastructure that is device-neutral. One is free to pick a phone (or a TV) based on features and cosmetics; the service being provided doesn’t care, as long as it ties in at the appropriate places. Medical software is more like the user interface to a database. There are multiple database systems out there, and each has it’s own little quirks, and the “presentation layer” is typically more closely tied to the nature of the back end. There’s only one phone system (and one TV system) and all devices have to talk to the same back end the same way. That doesn’t apply to, say, Oracle and SQL Server and Teradata and DB2. The analogy is starting to creak now, but you can see what I mean.