“Nancy Luo didn’t expect an answer when she e-mailed Steve Jobs one Wednesday evening two summers ago,” Robert McMillan reports for Wired. “But less than a day later, an Apple emissary knocked on her door at the University of Chicago Hospitals.”
“The iPad had hit the market just four months earlier, but the young, tech-savvy residents at the hospital were already using Apple’s tablet to access medical data on the go. Luo thought that with some internal tweaking, she could measure whether the students were actually saving time with the iPad. ‘I just wanted to see if maybe Apple wanted to help us out,’ she remembers,” McMillan reports. “Jobs didn’t get back to her, but at 5:21 a.m. the next day, she had an answer. Luo didn’t even read the e-mail at first, assuming it was some sort of automatic response. But when she did, she was amazed. The note was from an Apple employee named Afshad Mistri, who offered to swing by the hospital later that afternoon — he just happened to be in Chicago that day. ‘Your e-mail was forwarded to me for follow up from Steve,’ wrote Mistri, Apple’s medical market manager, the company’s go-to guy for the medical industry.”
McMillan reports, “Afshad Mistri is Apple’s secret weapon in a stealth campaign to get the iPad into the hands of doctors. And it’s a campaign that seems to be paying off.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
That’s SJ for ya. 100% zoom. 100% zip. 100% committed. Love the iPad. Let’s have it in a 7″ form factor so it can be tucked in the pockets of a lab coat. Love ya Steve. Tim, are you listening? 7″ and hey 4″ for the iPhone too. Way to go Apple.
Dude you are just a fool. And I thought (mistakenly) that you had at least a scintilla of clue.
Now you’re just another idiot troll haunting the forum, you want a 4″ phone and a 7″ tablet, those sizes just don’t work well. Go buy a sumsung, they don’t care what thier stuff works like. (well except for their spy-ware system that seems to work excellently) Samdung products seems to be (from what you say) a perfect match for you.
Oh, and don’t let the screen door hit you in that ass on the way out.
That’s a bit harsh, Tesselator. A 4″ iPhone display could work very well for many people, even most people. And a 7″ iPad might make a good companion to the 9.7″ iPad. BLN is full of it on many occasions. However, in this instance, I’d say that his opinions on the iPhone and iPad display sizes are just as valid as yours.
Possibly… perhaps his almost constant whining has been grating on me lately.
A 7″ tablet just doesn’t work very well, look at the reviews of the 7″ tablets (even overlooking the fact that android doesn’t work very well) the 7″ screen has half the area of the 11 and yet the device is only about 30% smaller in any direction. (and normally thicker because of the battery space)
The 4″ iphone would have been great for me (I have quite large hands) but for the average consumer (and 90% of woman) it is a no go because you can’t easily operate (or in some cases at all) it with one hand. (and they are’t going to make a “big hands” version of the iphone.)
Wingeing on endlessly for weeks on end about it just pisses people (like me) off.
Since when does a Doctor slip your chart into a lab coat? BTW charts are close in size to and iPad and no one sees the need to make them smaller…
Maybe instead of a smaller iPad we need larger lab coat pockets?
No no… we’d then have to deal with people complaining that Apple turned another industry on its head 😉
…and just when you thought the cutting edge of laboratory coat technology couldn’t advance any further.
: )
If you read the full article, there’s a whole sidebar that explains how a lab coat company has done just that — their first major design change in 50 years and now their top seller!
What did they used to do with the 12X9″ clipboards had in the past? The next thing you will be asking for is a larger screen or a stretchable screen.
They put the clipboards in a pocket on the wall or the end of the bed. Staff will be using HUDs for charts and Siri before iPads will be cheap enough to leave in a pocket at the end of each bed.
My word. An interesting, detailed and well written article. Don’t often see one of those.
I’ve yet to see an iPad in use by a doctor but it is a fantastic idea. My Kaiser hospital uses PC stations which although a bit less personal does speed up writing prescriptions and checking and adding to medical records.
I disagree with the author that this will not be a windfall for Apple. They could easily sell a million iPads a year for medical uses given how many hospitals etc there are worldwide.
My mom needed reconstructive microsurgery. I gave an iPad as a thank you gift to the surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, a Xmas ago, where he uses it with his patients. I knew he’d use it because he had an iPhone. Of course Boston Children’s was one of the two hospitals featured in the iPad video Steve showed at the iPad2 launch.
It’s stealth so don’t look for the Apple promoter – it’s a Mistri.
1
Aha, a Tom Stoppard reference. Great!
My PCP’s office is outfitted with Tablets, but I have not been able to determine who the heck makes them yet.
I can see they run windows and are pretty thick vs. the iPad but I do not see a company name or logo on them. I’ll have to just ask the next time I’m in there.
They do have a slick setup, where the nurses and drs just carry them and dock them when they come into the room.
They have been using this system for at least 3 years now.
The only thing that sucks is when they leave the room they usually take them with them…. so now I have nothing to try and crack into while waiting for the DR.
Mine has some too, Windows based, and they’re horrible. Big clunky things, they don’t register touch very well, and they kept disconnecting from the network. Took me 3 or 4 of them to complete my forms on the visit. They need to be able to go iPad.
Probably Symbol, lots of hospitals use them, and they are total crap. Buggy crappy Windows, and commodity hardware. YUCK.
BLN is trolling again. He likes his strategy. He likes it a lot.
It’s not a coincidence that Apple started emphasizing usability by doctors and other hospital professionals, just at the same time, a few years ago, that Steve Jobs started going to doctors and hospitals regularly.