Apple Tablet Being Developed For HealthCare Industry
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So? How on earth do you conclude it's being "developed for healthcare the industry" from this? It may be developed with the industry in mind, as surely any tablet/PDA/smartphone in the past decade has, but that doesn't even remotely imply priority.
I have no doubt it's something Apple's considered. The one place Microsoft's TabletPC has gotten any kind of traction has been in hospitals. But Apple's culture isn't conducive to meeting Federal guidelines and that's not something that can be changed on a dime.
(Also, the sheer fact that he mentions the Obama administration shows this guy doesn't know much. Government sadly doesn't move that quickly so rushing to market with a tablet would put it out there years before any action the Obama administration takes would go into effect)
For instance (but certainly not limited to), insurance appraisers, real estate brokers, delivery services,restaurants and yes, the medical industry.
But not in all cases were these successful.
Apple has become very much a mass market producer, I fail to see why they would want to specifically target a niche with their product.
More likely than not it will simply be a general consumer device that gets 'adopted' by verticals.
Another big issue with using a consumer device for a vertical market is theft, there had better be a very solid way to make sure that those tablets laying around in hospitals don't grow little legs all by themselves.
Anything in a hospital that is of pocket size, valuable, not nailed down and guarded by a rotweiler tends to walk out.
I was in a supervisory role last winter, and I really tried to make a tablet PC work for me. In theory, the idea would be great. I could have access to all the info on all the patients and all the individual units while I wandered around. The killers were lack of battery life, spottiness of wireless connectivity and weight of the tablet.
Our hospital just built a new $200 million facility, and even though the wireless connectivity is much better, we now have PC's at every bedside. (and we still generate reams of paper charts on each patient). And, our supervisors still walk around with a clipboard full of paper.
I'm not buying the whole tablet PC in health care idea. Even if Apple developed it, I don't think the industry would buy it.
The tablet/slate is making serious in-roads in clinical/pharmaceutical research. How do I know? My team just released a new tablet product for collecting patient reported outcomes, and it is selling well. Of course, this is quite different than your situation, I think, but clinical research (particularly electronic data collection) is an always-growing market. If, indeed, there is any truth to the rumor, that could mean that Apple will treat the tablet more like a "computer" and less like the iPhone--meaning users/developers have far more control over the device. (Initially, my company was very excited about the iPhone, but there was absolutely no way we could make Apple's business model work for us.)
Disclaimer: I do some contracting work with corporations named in the post.
The tablet-and-touch-screen form factor has some interesting healthcare properties- the most important, IMHO, that a well-designed touch screen UI can be used easily by people in a hurry who are wearing gloves. From what I've seen, most tablet PCs just use modified versions of Windows, which means lots of small and fiddly UI elements, and therefore falls short of meeting this potential UI sweet-spot. If Apple can get an iPhone-style UI with nice big buttons, task-oriented interaction (as opposed to document-oriented or window-oriented), etc. working on a gadget that can be easily sterilized/autoclaved and that has a screen big enough to display significant amounts of data, they might have something that would work really well in a medical context.
The problem, as always, is that people (especially docs and hospital IT admins) are really resistant to change, and EHR vendors resist true interoperability with the passion of a thousand burning suns. But, hey, the iPhone's remarkable success has demonstrated that building a gadget that doctors & nurses actually want to use is a good way to force management to support it (at least, it has at my hospital), so there is precedent for Apple-driven bottom-up change in healthcare IT (now that's a sentence that I would never have imagined writing four or five years ago...).
but for reading the newspaper or surfing on your couch, I doubt that it's so much of an improvement over a notebook.
Reading on my Kindle DX is completely different and way better than reading on my 15" MacBook Pro.
The form factor is also quite big, it's not something you're going to put in your jeans. And when you have to carry it around in a backpack, most of the people will probably just take their notebook because when it comes to serious work, emailing and actually creating content a keyboard is a lot faster.
The tablet can't be much smaller than the macbook air and even if it is, I think a lot of people would go for the MBA.
For consuming media, a tablet is great, but epaper is even better and we haven't heard any rumours about epaper being used. Now for music you already have an iPod, and just for watching movies and reading blogs in color, I think is not enough to convince people to buy another device.
Remember a tablet would completely change the way people behave, the iPod replaced the walkman, the iPhone replaced a cell phone. A tablet is neither replacing an iphone nor a notebook, so at a 1000$ price tag, I think the value it brings is not enough.
The problem is that no one offers a complete system that "just works" from end to end. Think of how easy it is to sit down at a Mac and figure out how you get on the web and print a document. That same ease of use needs to apply to the entire patient monitoring chain: data acquisition, patient records, ICU visits, etc. Right now the market is saturated with companies too lazy to do it all themselves so they buy smaller companies that have done each piece well and spend billions and years trying to integrate it all. There is huge money spent, but only because the system has no other choice.
It would be a great sector for startups if you knew how to deal with the FDA.
http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/01/09/apple-tablet-reps-s...
http://tabletpcnursing.blogspot.com/2004/09/longhorn-in-heal...
Apple Tablet To Replace Clipboard