Healthcare Tablet Computing

This spring Healthcare reform passed in the US and numerous changes were proposed and accepted. The reform document was 2500 pages long and detailed many sweeping changes in the delivery and provision of healthcare for Americans for now and for years to come. One huge resounding benefit from Healthcare reform was that IT would be a huge expenditure for years to come. For many people that is not such a big deal, but for those that are in IT its wonderful news.

Many people feel that healthcare in this country is lacking from a technological standpoint. The way that delivery is done is far behind those of other countries, and each day that sweeping change is not made we are falling further behind. Back in February US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded 760 Million Dollars to jumpstart better service delivery in Healthcare IT. This is a huge step forward. What the awards provide is the background and training needed for the impending implementation of electronic patient records to better align the US with the rest of the world in delivery of Healthcare services. This was followed by The Senate Special Committee on Aging conducting a hearing last week (April 22, 2010) on the impact of Healthcare impacts from a National Broadband Network.

These two steps are just the tip of the iceberg for where things will go in the US over the next few years. When President Obama mentioned in his state of the union address this spring, his mention of budget cuts touched most parts of government except for spending related to the war, Healthcare (HHS), and Social Security (SSA). The direct result of that statement combined with Healthcare reform means that IT in and around Healthcare in the US is about to be a huge topic for years to come.

You might ask how this impacts tablet computing within Healthcare. In looking back in time, people are very slow to adopt new things unless there is money to do so and the push from the right people to make it so. In many cases mandates or standards have always pushed things forward. That argument will bode very well for tablet computing in Healthcare along with the other technological changes due to Healthcare in this country.  NIST, the National Institutes for Standards and Technology, have released information concerning and project to develop standards to ease the implementation of advanced Health IT projects. This will provide many with the framework needed to make this IT based Healthcare future a reality.

The impact for tablet computing is both direct and indirect. When people are asked to make change, or rather forced to change they very rarely do it halfway. They typically implement the best and latest technology implementations to allow for fewer updates as time goes on. For example, when Hopkins went to implement SAP to replace its aging paper based product, they didn't install an older version of SAP, they installed the latest and most up to date. This provides for a better training ground as well as one that fosters adoption across the enterprise. If an organization decides to implement partial change rather than sweeping change, there tends to be a push from some users and clients and even management to revert back to the old systems, rather than learning something new. This can be catastrophic for future development, which is often why this method is not done often. The indirect result is that tablet computing is a well established option when implementing Healthcare IT projects. It serves as a vehicle to better bolster and support the EPR requirements and is easy to deploy.

The direct result is that tablets will be pushed to the next level from this increased interest. The iPad was mentioned in the first post and will be touched on here and in future entries as well. While this device was not designed directly for Healthcare implementations, it has the interest from both the public and private sectors as well as the public as a whole to be a serious game changer. This will allow other vendors to benefit from the interest and hop along for the ride.

The next entry will touch on this and other ideas relating to overall infrastructure changes and how adoption can be better supported and handled when change happens in Healthcare IT and computing as a whole.


Also, take a look at this link, the HHS AHRQ (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) has a twitter feed that updates regularly relating to interesting Healthcare related news.