Doctors, start your tablets

When I talk with people (even health policy people) about ways to implement more technology into health care, like doctors using computers during appointments, I get some interesting answers.  Like computing while seeing patients will destroy the doctor-patient relationship.  This answer is quite puzzling, as the doctor-patient relationship is pretty mutilated already, and the benefits of direct computing by physicians (cost, time, efficiency, and most important: reduction of error), seem to outweigh the discomfort of your doctor occasionally typing things in.

But (via the Health Business Blog), Microsoft is introducing a new product that can quiet this debate with one fell swoop:

The Microsoft Origami Project seems to be a nice little tablet-style PC along the lines of the Motion Computing LS800 that I have described before. It's the kind of hardware that makes electronic medical records, e-prescribing and decision support tools all the more practical for physicians by making it possible to carry a full-featured device in a lab coat pocket.

And I'd add, without a big screen that apparently perverts the essential nature of physician care.

Comments

[Joe]

This tablet can run website's like my url above to let physicians create legible medical documents.

[janinsanfran]

Such a device could work wonders in the overstressed emergency room where I frequently take an indigent friend. They never seem to be able to find or transmit her records, though they have a 10 year history of seeing her.

People at the low end of medical care, where the idea of a primary care physician is mostly illusory, especially need what better computerization can offer. At least then the harried interns and bored attendings they see can have more idea of the the histories.

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

From experience in implementing some mobile computing tools for physician clinical use, may I throw in a few observations? Tablet computing is a lot more practical than the PDAs a lot of clinicians prefer. PDAs are so lightweight that they frequently get damaged. With a touch-sensitive screen, it's harder to encapsulate them in a way that they can be disinfected. Tablet platforms with keyboards are a lot more rugged and a lot easier to clean.
I'm very hesitant, from bad experience, to see a clinical device running Windows unless very careful care has been taken with its physical implementation. Surprisingly, this is not a criticism of Microsoft.
While many physicians are as conscientious with portable computers as with an ECG or ventilator, we had all too much experience with physicians, if the device allowed them to do so, to load some stock market or golf application on what they regarded as their personal computer.
When the portable device crashed because their applications were using resources that were supposed to be dedicated, it somehow became our fault. The situation improved when we went to LINUX for most handhelds, because someone with enough experience to put third-party software usually knows why that's a bad idea for a special-purpose computer.