Tablet PC To Open New Avenues in Health Care Arena

Geoff Palmer, president of InfoCater, a Newton, Mass., solution provider that specializes in tablet solutions, said roughly one-quarter of his company's sales are to health-care organizations. He said he sees a variety of medical imaging uses for the new Tablet PC platform, as well as existing pen and tablet computers.

For one, the tablet, while portable, provides a better image viewing experience than smaller handhelds. "When a doctor is accessing patient records, he can bring up an X-ray or pictures from an ultrasound as image files on his tablet," Palmer said. "You couldn't see that significantly on a Pocket PC."

Also, the Tablet PC platform's inking capabilities will provide medical personnel with a means of adding comments and notes to images, he said. "Just as you can annotate a Word document, you can also annotate a picture," Palmer said. "This means that one specialist can mark up an X-ray, and another doctor in the hospital can see it."

Another potential use for Tablet PCs is for patient education. Doctors will be able to use anatomy applications to show patients the origins of their complaints and help them to understand their problems and the suggested treatments.

The Tablet PC is also expected to have a broad range of applications in the medical market beyond imaging. "Doctors are using them for a few different things,accessing patient records, writing prescriptions, checking for drug interactions," Palmer said.

When attached to a wireless network, tablet computers can act as digital clipboards for medical practitioners, allowing them to record patient data at a bedside, access medical reference materials, dictate observations and transmit prescriptions to pharmacies. Palmer said Tablet

PCs could also be used in waiting rooms, allowing patients to fill out medical history forms electronically.

Beyond the point of care, tablets can be used in applications that touch virtually every hospital department, said Doug Smith, president of Filbitron, a Toronto-based solution provider that has been selling pen tablet computers to a variety of markets for 12 years.

"The health-care market is not only doctors standing over patients," Smith said. "Tablet solutions have uses in every hospital department,in ERs, cancer departments, physiotherapy departments, etc. Individual departments have specific responsibilities and specific uses for pen tablet solutions. Plus, there are clinics, extended care facilities, home care, etc."

Smith predicts that most X-ray viewing will continue to be done with X-ray readers. However, he said tablet computers will be useful to doctors for accessing medical records, which will be more image-rich as hospitals computerize X-rays and other images and store them as part of a permanent health-care record.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which requires hospitals to securely store patient records for seven years, is driving the momentum to digitize and will also increase the penetration of Tablet PCs, Palmer said. "HIPAA will drive a lot of the growth," he said. "Tablets can be used to reduce paperwork and errors and to have info constantly available to doctors. Also, patient records and X-rays must be stored securely on servers because of HIPAA. When a doctor is accessing patient records, he can easily call up an X-ray on his tablet."

New Tablet PCs running the Windows XP operating system are slated to be released this week by a variety of companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Acer, Motion Computing, ViewSonic and Electrovaya.

"I'm excited about the new products because of the initiatives Microsoft made," Smith said, referring to the partners Microsoft has lined up behind the Tablet PC platform.

Smith cited as an example the Tablet PC's new inking technology, which allows users to input and store handwritten notes. He said this feature will be particularly useful to doctors who need to jot down patient notes and call them up quickly at a later visit.

"The new Tablet PCs also have brighter screens, sharper images, and more power and storage," Smith said.