Yale Med School chooses iPad2

Yale School of Medicine will provide all its students with an iPad2 for use in the classroom and clinical settings. Students will be able to download the entire medical curriculum and to use it to either read and handle confidential patient information.

The school is distributing about 520 iPads 2. If you think of it as an expensive initiative, consider that the school spends about $100,000 every year to copy, collate, and distribute course materials; costs that the iPads 2 are going to dramatically slash. The school plans to cover the costs of the plan in about five years.

The use of iPad 2 was tested with a pilot group of nine first-year students last spring. Although the group included not technology-savvy students, the response to the test was generally positive.

Yale isn't the first school to introduce iPads for classroom use: the Stanford University School of Medicine gave the tablet to first-year and master's students last fall.

[via Yale Daily News]

More tablets (read: iPads) coming at Texas Health Resources

Texas Health Resources will be using the Apple iPad to help test patients' recovery, check the status of inpatients, and share and view medical records around the hospital.

The company has a strategy called mHealth (Mobile Health), that is built around mobile devices. A recent internal survey suggests that 40 percent of the doctors in facilities are already using a tablet—usually an iPad.

Texas Health has also developed six apps to help their strategy. One reason why tablets are so useful is that they allow nurses and doctors to stay mobile and have more hands-on time with patients, instead of having to sit in front of a computer.

Instead of a pad, just carry an iPad. So simple. (With a little help from right apps)

[PCWorld via The Unofficial Apple Weblog]

iPhone is not as vital as oxygen… but can measure its saturation in blood

The Electrical and Computer Engineering in Medicine (ECEM) research group and the Pediatric Anesthesia Research Team (PART) at the Canadian University of British Columbia have developed a pulse oximeter that works with the iPhone.

An oximeter measure pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation and the device can be used at home by people with respiratory problems.

Readings are stored and sent over the Internet to the hospital or the doctor's office.

Just don't place stressful calls while you're measuring your pulse rate!

[Read the whole stuff at The Unofficial Apple Weblog]

Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Buy Large Numbers of iPads

In the primary care setting, physicians typically give a pharma sales no less than 30 seconds per interaction, most of which is time spent signing for samples. […]

The pharmaceutical sales community is now undergoing an enormous shift, with widespread interest in transitioning toward HTML5-based tablet devices like the iPad. […]

Despite conventional wisdom, several major pharmaceutical companies are putting the cart before the horse by purchasing iPads in large quantities prior to even owning a single application to run on the iPad.

With so much care about the iPad even before having the good software, seems there's no cure for soi-disant iPad competition.

[read the original article by Eric Newmark on Computerworld]