Medical-sector companies latch onto Apple’s revolutionary iPad

13 years ago

“Medical-sector companies are passing out thousands of iPad tablet computers to salespeople to spruce up their pitch to doctors, and at the same time giving Apple Inc. a crucial foot in the door to business customers,” Jon Kamp and Roger Cheng report for The Wall Street Journal. “Abbott Laboratories, Medtronic Inc. and Boston Scientific Corp. are among the drug and medical-device firms making the move, while others say they are testing out the devices.”

“The tablet computers offer new ways to display product information or surgical-implant techniques, and help eliminate time wasted on issues that don’t drive sales, according to companies,” Kamp and Cheng report. “Their quick start-up times mean the salesmen can jump into their presentations before doctors lose interest.”

Kamp and Cheng report, “Medtronic, a Minneapolis-based maker of implantable heart devices and other products, recently bought 4,500 iPads for its sales and marketing team, making it one of the iPad’s biggest corporate buyers. Mr. Hedges said the company could buy as many as 6,000 iPads… There appears to be something of an iPad arms race in the $200 billion medical-devices sector. Heart-device maker Boston Scientific recently bought 2,000 for its sales team, and orthopedics company Zimmer Holdings Inc. is rolling out more than 1,000 of the tablets. Stryker Corp., a Zimmer rival, said it has deployed iPads ‘and a number of applications’ in a pilot program.”