iPad Revolutionizes Local Healthcare

Monday, September 12, 2011

Maggie Lange, GoLocalProv Contributor

Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School has demonstrated a profound embrace of the latest technology in medicine: it has required its class of approximately 100 first year students to purchase iPad tablets to replace half their textbooks for the year.

This shift to tablets not only indicates the medical school's paperless, forward-thinking ethos, but more importantly, it meshes with the rapidly growing importance of the tablet--and the iPad in particular--in healthcare settings.

Growing presence in RI hospitals

The iPad offers a range of educational applications, but it was the increasing use of tablets in the medical realm that prompted the administration at Warren Alpert to make the tablet mandatory.

“You’ll see various residency and clerkships encouraging use in hospitals,” says Luba Dumenco, Director of Pre-Clinical Curriculum at Warren Alpert, “The device lends itself to medical applications.”

Though Apple’s iPad was released in the spring of 2010, it has already had a large impact on the medical community. There are already hundreds of applications that function as medical resources, databases, and organizing tools.

Lifespan Hospitals began to use iPads last Christmas. David Hemendinger, Lifespan's Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, says that there is no mandatory iPad program yet, but hundreds of doctors have volunteered to switch, and he estimates that after the current training with the nursing staff is complete, iPads might be required at the Lifespan hospitals. "For us in the hospital system,” says Hemendinger, “these are the true game-changer."

Similar benefits in education and medicine

For Lifespan, iPads have made locating records much easier. Every resource is in the hospital database is easily and securely available. Additionally, the iPad is being used as a visual way to explain information to patients. Doctors can sit down with the patient’s records, charts, anatomy diagrams, and graphs to explain complicated information with visual material.

“Most patients can learn the technology quickly and it’s non-obtrusive. It's a whole new paradigm for us in regards to involving the patient,” says Hemindinger.

In the similar way the patients can benefit from this explanation, the students at Warren Alpert use the visual interface as more than a replacement for textbooks. The iPads are a portable medical reference source with capabilities beyond the traditional book format; for example, if a student is particularly interested in a diagram, the iPad user can choose to zoom in on cells with a virtual microscopy tool. The way that these students learn on iPads might be used in their immediate future to explain information to their patients.

More use of materials, less paper

The Warren Alpert administration hopes that by transferring the textbooks to the iPad, they will actually increase the use of textbooks. Carrying a sleek, skinny, 1.33-pound tablet from classroom to classroom is much more appealing than lugging around four or five textbooks. This will also cut the two long shelves of printer paper used per student, per year, down to close to nothing.

While the iPad costs $500 to $600, Rahul Banerjee and Michael Kim, two second-years hired by Warren Alpert to help prepare the iPad for incoming students, say that the students know this is a worthwhile investment, not just because of its academic benefits. “Students and staff know they’ll need to catch up,” says Kim.

Niall Johnston, the Vice President of Business Development at 3D4 Medical, a California-based company specializing in medical applications including an anatomy program called Skeletal Pro, says Warren Alpert is simply joining the ranks of several other medical schools that have required an iPad, like Stanford Medical School, the University of Arizona, and UC Irvine School of Medicine.

"We are really excited to see what the marketplace will look like in 12 and 24 months,” says Johnston, who believes that the program will soon be “irresistible, we believe, for every medical student to carry an iPad—and for every medical school to roll out an iPad program."

An interface that appeals to all

Similarly, Lifespan's Hemendiner says that the appealing interface actually encourages more thorough use of records and other hospital technology. “They are simplistic, easy to use, there is ownership and pride in having one,” he says, “These are the folks that are kinesthetically oriented—and the iPad tends to feel pleasurable within their hands.”

"We’re at a real tipping point in medicine. The physicians and the nurses love using this technology, so they'll use [existing technology] systems more,” he says, which will help them to treat the patients with more knowledge at hand.