I find this completely fascinating. Yes, the Apple Store is demoing various medical applications like EMR on the iPad. Here’s an excerpt from blogger Iltifat Husain walking into an Apple Store:
When I recently walked into my local Apple store to buy an iPad accessory, I saw a group of about 20 people huddled around a large LCD screen while an Apple employee was giving a workshop.
When I saw the LCD screen full of medical applications, I was shocked. This wasn’t your run of the mill “how to use your iPhone” workshop.
The people gathered for the workshop consisted of healthcare professionals in medicine, dentistry, and other fields. About a third of the group consisted of physicians.
The workshop was focused on how the iPhone and iPad can be useful for their practices and as reference tools for day to day work.
The workshop was led by an Apple employee who went through a slideshow presentation of useful medical applications, such as Epocrates, iMurmur, Airstrips OB, and many of the other useful applications we’ve featured on iMedicalApps before.
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Along with the presentation given by the Apple employee, a MacPractice representative was on hand to demonstrate their electronic health record and how it worked from the desktop to the iPhone and to the iPad.
Pretty interesting to see Apple committing that type of resource to marketing the clinical applications.
Goodness, I’ve learned yet again not to publish before reading your stuff John; I’d have loved to include this tidbit in my post on private companies working with healthcare this morning (I may go back and add a link). Apple certainly seems to be trying to embrace the medical community with their latest launches. The only issue I can see is potentially (what else) privacy and security. But if the providers are just as engaged in helping the industry along, that may work out (and perhaps even better than HITECH envisions).
We all have that happen sometimes. No reason not to add something later. I do that quite a bit if it provides value to readers.