A Tablet is Less Expensive Than a Re-hospitalization

Of course the idea of giving out a tablet to every patient is ridiculous. Plus, there’s no need to give it to everyone since many of them have one already. However, many have often said that it’s ridiculous to give a tablet device to a patient. It’s just too cost prohibitive.

Certainly there are many situations where handing a patient a tablet isn’t warranted. However, we’re going to see a growing number of cases where the use of technology on a tablet can reduce re-hospitalizations. Think about the minimum cost of a hospitalization against the cost of a $250-$500 tablet. Doesn’t feel quite as expensive when you start comparing the prices.

The real challenge we face is providing applications on that tablet that produce the desired result (ie. reduced re-hospitalizations). We still have a ways to go on this.

I recently heard that Jaguar no longer gives out paper owners manuals with their cars, but instead provides the owners manual on a tablet. Of course, Jaguar does it because of the mystique of giving their customer a tablet. I don’t think we’ll only look to the high end Jaguar type hospitals to start handing out tablets. I could see tablets being handed to patients across broad sections of healthcare.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • And what apps would you include on this tablet that have proven to reduce readmission?

  • Dan,
    As I said in my post, that’s the hard part. I’ve heard anecdotes of ones that reduce readmission, but it’s so early I don’t think we have many with hard proven data driven proof of their results. However, many people are working on it.

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