From EHR Intelligence:
What’s worked so far with iPad applications? What hasn’t?
The most important thing is that we re-imagined the way a physician and nurse can interact with medical data for the post-PC era. So far, there have been two approaches in the marketplace. One, which is a truly dumb idea in my opinion, is to try to run desktop software on their iPad through remote virtualization or Citrix. And that’s just a disaster waiting to happen because of all the pinching and zooming and you can’t do that any easier than you can point and click on your iPhone; it doesn’t make any sense. A lot of hospitals are doing that, it really speaks to how urgent doctors and nurses feel about mobility and how important it is. The remote virtualization is a stopgap measure until actual native iOS and Android software is available to run these systems. The other thing that people do, now I’m not going to name any names, is that many of the most dominant hospital information systems are releasing iPad versions. They reorganize the information a little bit, make the buttons bigger and say ‘voila’ here’s a native iPad application.
Apple has been researching mobile device navigation for a very long time and are very good at what they do. They offer a very easy to read human interface guideline that any developer can read on their website. No major vendor has actually read that short document. If you follow those guidelines, there’s a great amount of complex data that you can interact with. And not just for consuming data, that’s the big argument against the iPad. You can read your email etc…, but the actual production of data doesn’t work so well, and I would vehemently disagree with that. If you look at some of the built in Apple applications, there’s a lot of data that can be input. If you just look at the settings application on an iPad and see how much data you can plug in and modify there. We actually looked at what Apple had done and worked closely with Apple to create a new navigation paradigm to allow doctors and nurses to review EHR and enter a new way of thinking.
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