Editor’s Note: Here’s a follow up to a previous review.
Everyone is up in arms about use case scenarios for the iPad. Some seem to think the device will solve all the world's problems. Others think it's nothing more than a mutated iPod touch.
One of the imagined use cases for the iPad is that it may find a friend in the medical world. Some say that in hospitals and clinics, the iPad could be a convenient and connected fill-in for the traditional clip board.
I recently spoke with Dr. Aka Gvakharia. He's lived in and around Silicon Valley for a long time, working at Stanford hospital and others in the area. He now treats patients in Richmond, Virginia. While Gvakharia loves his iPhone in conjunction with LogMeIn's remote desktop app, he's not sure about how the iPad will fly with doctors.
"I read today an article about how the iPad is going to revolutionize medical care, as doctors use it for treating patients, and I couldn't stop laughing," he says.
"No doctor will carry around the iPad. Do you know where Apple went with the iPad? They went to Cedar Sinai with the iPad because that's where all the celebrities go. That's where they will carry around the iPad," Gvakharia says, adding that Steve Jobs is a marketing genius.
But there's no way that Apple could get the price of the iPad to an acceptable level where hospitals would even consider issuing them to staff, he says. "Even if it dropped down to 200 bucks, I guarantee you that they would bolt it to the cot or a huge dolly. Even $25 VCR players are bolted down in a hospital because they will walk away. And I guarantee you, I will forget and leave an iPad in a room somewhere."
Gvakharia says that if the iPad doesn't fit in a pocket, doctors won't use it. He chronicled his history with devices, from an early Palm PDA to a slim Dell laptop. He loved the Palm device because it could easily be stowed in his coat pocket. The laptop always got left in the car.
"I walk around with a coffee all the time. So what am I going to do? Keep a little man purse around my waist? Maybe, but then you end up leaving it the car. What am I going to do when I have to go in at 3 a.m. to see someone in the ICU who is crashing with a laptop in my hand? No way," he says.
To be fair, I must add that my talk with Gvakharia was offered up by LogMeIn as a follow-up to my review of its remote desktop app, Ignition, for the iPhone. In my review, I said that due to the small size of the iPhone's screen, remote desktop apps were a hard sell for the average user who may just want to grab a couple of files off their desktop.
Gvakharia is a huge fan of Ignition, for good reason, and it’s hard to doubt the authenticity of his enthusiasm for the product. To listen to him describe how he uses his iPhone and Ignition, Gvakharia's makes full use of both device and software.
"Can I access my patient information in the office that runs a proprietary multi-thousand dollar electronic medical records system on a Windows computer and get that information while I'm walking from my car to see the patient at 4 a.m. on a Saturday, which is dead time for a hospital," he says, setting up a scenario where many doctors are out of luck if they need patient records.
When I pushed him on whether it might not be just a tad bit easier if he were using Ignition on an iPad, he stood firm, saying the iPad is just too cumbersome and expensive to be of use in the often chaotic life of a medical doctor.