Written by Dale Buckey @ Wireless.MD 9/9/11
This may seem trivial to us today but hearing that the strength of doctors’ iPad adoption has caught the health care IT industry by surprise, is kind of an understatement? Still, there are two things Dr. Larry Nathanson can’t work without when he’s on duty in the emergency ward: his stethoscope and his iPad.
Watch the video here. Is the iPad The New Stethoscope?
After nearly a year using the tablet, it has become an integral tool for treating patients.
“As I am walking from room to room, I know who I need to see next,” he explained, scrolling through the virtual emergency room patient board on the iPad.
“I definitely feel lost when I don’t have this on a shift,” he said.
As the director of emergency medicine at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Nathanson was among the first doctors at the hospital to buy an iPad the day it launched. He paid for it himself, but it has more than paid off in the time he saves not having to chase down records.
“Patients often have a lot of questions, and I am able to answer them immediately with the latest data in real time,” Nathanson said. “I can sit there at the beside and I can go over what’s going on.”
When it comes to treating surgical patients, being able to pull up diagrams and x-rays at their bedside has been a real game changer for B.I. Deaconess Dr. Henry Feldman.
“The number of times I’ve had patients say to me ‘That’s the first time I’ve understood my disease’ — I mean, it happens all the time to me. To me, that’s validation as a doctor,” he said.
Seems to me to be just another step in the Wireless Health evolution.
Also….
There’s a nice video over at Technology Review on the benefits of Wireless Health with Doctors and staff using the iPad. You can see the video at this link http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=745 Technology Review, which is published by MIT, is only allowing the video to be watched from their site directly…..