Few months ago, during the fever pitch surrounding the announcement of Apple’s iPad tablet, Software Advice surveyed 178 physicians, nurses, medical students and healthcare IT professionals about what the healthcare industry’s ideal tablet would look like. This isn’t our first time talking tablets and healthcare. In April of last year, we wondered if the Apple tablet would become the ideal device to run electronic health record (EMR) software.

Our goal with this survey: Find out what healthcare professionals want in a tablet and how well Apple’s iPad fulfills those wants.

Let’s see what we found out from our survey results:

Majority of Healthcare Professionals Are Likely to Buy a Tablet

When nearly a dozen new tablet devices were shown at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, it looked like 2010 was going to be the year of the tablet’s emergence as a consumer gadget.

Judging by the survey data above, 2010 also may be the year of the tablet’s emergence in healthcare. Of the respondents to the survey, 54% said they were either very likely or somewhat likely to purchase a tablet for healthcare use over the next year. That’s good news for tablet makers.

Tablet Tasks

Healthcare workers want to use tablets for a wide variety of tasks. A majority of our respondents said they wanted to use a tablet for all of the above tasks except for billing, coding and claims.

Ease of Use and Software Selection are Top Reasons for Tablet Selection

According to survey results, ease of use is the major purchase reason for a majority of healthcare professionals. That may fare well for the iPad. Why? The iPad runs on the popular iPhone operating system. Thousands of doctors are already using iPhones in clinical settings.

In addition, the iPad has a finger touchscreen. Of our healthcare respondents, 63% said they preferred a finger touchscreen over styluses and voice dictation when asked about their data input preference. Many of those same people said that the speed of the data entry was the determining factor when noting a preference for the finger touchscreen.

How important is quick data entry in healthcare? Here’s what one respondent had to say:

As an MD in the ER, I am the most ‘expensive’ employee … doing data entry. The available software for data entry for my physicians is rudimentary at best. Speed is the key. I need to be able to see 30 patients in 8 hours and FULLY document the visit in a time-efficient fashion.

In the case of healthcare workers, ease of use could appears to at least partially equate to speed of use. The iPad’s operating system and touchscreen would appear to have both criteria.

In terms of medical software selection, the iPad lags far behind virtually every other tablet on the market. Despite having over 5,000 medical apps immediately available for download through Apple’s App Store, none of those apps are a functional EMR system or even remotely close to one. The vast majority of EMR software on the market today will not run on a Mac OSX operating system. Most require a Windows-based operating system to function.

The iPad may have an easy to use operating system helped by a finger touchscreen but those pros are nullified by that system’s inability to run the vast majority of medical software on the market today.

What Healthcare Wants, the iPad Doesn’t Have

After reviewing dozens of tablets on the market, both consumer focused and healthcare focused, we came up with the above list of “must-have” features for healthcare tablets. We asked our survey respondents to check all of the features they felt were “must-have” features in a healthcare tablet device.

Unfortunately for the iPad, as we found out last Wednesday when Steve Jobs unveiled the tablet’s features, it only has a few of the top “must-have” features for healthcare use.

The iPad has Wi-Fi access; lightweight hardware (1.5 pounds); and arguably an ergonomic design. That’s it from this list.

It lacks a large number of features that healthcare professionals deemed important, such as resistance to dust and hospital fluids and disinfectants (the iPad does not have sealed ports); fingerprint access to the system (HIPAA compliance); barcode scanning (patient safety); and an integrated camera (documenting diagnosis). In fact, you could argue that the iPad’s difficulty in being disinfected or kept clean of hospital fluids is a deal breaker for healthcare workers.

Peripherals, such as an RFID reader and barcode scanner, may be available in the future. But because they’re not native to the iPad, they’re just more cables and cords a busy healthcare worker has to lug around. That’s another negative mark for the iPad.

Also, as we mentioned before, the iPad does not have a wide selection of medical software because of interoperability issues with it’s operating system. A wide selection of medical software was voted as a must-have feature by 70% of our respondents. Most medical software on the market, EMR software especially, will only operate in a Windows-based environment. This presents a huge problem for the iPad in healthcare.

The Verdict

Healthcare wants a tablet. Healthcare likes the iPhone. That does not translate into healthcare liking the iPad.

Simply put, the iPad lacks many fundamental features necessary to function in the healthcare field. From the difficulty disinfecting the device to its lack of interoperability with the majority of Windows-based healthcare systems and software, the iPad in its current state suffers from many of the same problems that previous, failed healthcare tablet PCs have suffered from.

The iPad may be sleek and simple to use. But that doesn’t translate into widespread adoption by the healthcare industry. In fairness, it doesn’t appear that Apple was targeting the healthcare vertical; their bread and butter market remains the consumer.

Survey Comments

In our final survey question, we asked the respondents, “Why haven’t tablets become mainstream devices in healthcare?” Here are a few of the more interesting responses we received. They touch on a few topics we didn’t address here today. They are sure to spark more discussion.

• “Shoehorning a desktop OS into a tablet does NOT work. This has been the approach of Microsoft and hence no uptake. A modal interface like the iPhone is more suitable to touchscreen use and makes more sense in this setting.”
• “Why use a new product when old ones are properly doing their jobs?”
• “Lack of a streamlined, polished UI for task specific functions inclusive of each practitioner’s duties.”
• “I have worked in ERs that have them and they never seem to work.  Low battery life? Unstable software? Limited functionality, too (not integrated with imaging).”

Demographic breakdown:

• Health IT Professional: 29% (52)
• Physician: 28% (50)
• Nurse: 16% (29)
• Other: 14% (23)
• Student: 12% (22)
• Admin support: 1%  (2)

Reference: www.softwareadvice.com

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