Steve Jobs got a new liver, the rest of us got a way to watch Hulu in bed, and the health care industry just might have gotten the big break it needed to launch into the 21st century. Following his hush-hush surgery last spring, it's easy to imagine the colossus of Cupertino, Calif., staring at the ceiling tiles in his hospital room and wishing for a way to hop online without having to bother with a laptop. It's also no stretch to picture him watching doctors, nurses, and orderlies peck away at a bevy of poorly designed, intermittently integrated, and just plain ugly devices and thinking, There's got to be a better way. The guy's nothing if not a multitasker.
So while the rest of the world texts, tweets, and generally fawns over the thing, that's muted compared with the reception the iPad is getting in the health care universe.
Medical-technology trade publications are getting positively Tiger Beat in their enthusiasm. Kaiser Permanente is testing uses for the device, a honcho at one of Harvard's main teaching hospitals has weighed in on his facility's iPad pilot program, and execs at Cedars-Sinai were rumored to have gotten prototypes last year. This isn't just hot-new-toy fever sweeping the mediverse, though: If the iPad becomes as ubiquitous in medical facilities as the iPod is everywhere else, it could usher in literally billions in savings.
The new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act created an urgency to make providing and managing health care more affordable, with the White House pointing to CBO predictions that 25 percent of our GDP would go toward health care in 2025 if the status quo persisted. Even by more conservative estimates, the price of health care is expected to increase significantly as millions of baby boomers enter their senior years. Digitization and interconnectivity between medical facilities is widely viewed as one major way to generate those efficiencies. A recently published report from PricewaterhouseCoopers points out that health care is "playing catch-up" when it comes to innovation, especially technological. It says the ubiquity of wireless mobile devices such as smartphones creates both an opportunity and a need for medical practitioners to overhaul how they deliver medical care.
When health care pros talk about the iPad, one phrase that crops up often is "form factor." The iPad's pretty. At a pound and a half, it's lightweight compared with most netbooks, fast, and can plug along for up to 10 hours on a charge. It's easy to read, and it's intuitive to use. This is Apple's secret sauce, and it might lead to the tipping point here.
The iPad's superb visual quality makes it a natural for reading patient x-rays, MRIs, and all the other ways doctors peer inside our bodies. Its big, bright touch screen is a massive improvement over illegible paper charts or chunky desktop computers when it comes to recording and reviewing patient data.
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