iPad and Healthcare

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Apple iPad, being a tablet device, may attract a lot of people from the healthcare. Scienceroll, one of the most popular medical tablet blogs out there, has published a list of pros and cons on why the iPad, unfortunately, is not the best for healthcare.

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 colleague (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.

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.

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