clinical assistant tablet PC comes by way of your occupatio

Although we sincerely hope your only encounter with a clinical assistant tablet PC comes by way of your occupation, it looks like Motion Computing is busting out a medically-focused device to help the dear LPNs keep things in order for the high-falutin' doctors. The C5 touts a vertically centered design, top-mounted carry handle, handwriting recognition, built-in digital camera for documenting wounds, time-stamp / voice-tag capabilities, and even an optional RFID reader to easily check patients in by scanning their wrist straps. Claiming to be the world's first device in the new mobile clinical assistant (MCA) category of PCs, it packs a 1.2GHz Intel Core Solo U1400 processor, Windows Vista Business or Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, a 10.4-inch XGA touchscreen, up to 1.5GB of DDR2 RAM, 30 / 60GB 1.8-inch hard drive options, 802.11a/b/g, Bluetooth, and a rechargeable Li-ion to boot.

Furthermore, it weighs in at just 3.1-pounds, so toting this bad boy around the office shouldn't be too much of a burden, and the "durable, semi-sealed enclosure" shouldn't have any issues handling the daily mishaps of your average doctor's lounge. So if you've been looking for a way to digitize your office and get far, far away from those paper-filled drawers, we're sure your IT rep will be hitting you up soon to sneak a peek at this $2,199 tablet.

I volunteered at a hospital emergency room for a month, and I think one of these would be very handy. Currently, documenting a patient is done via a stack of paper forms called a "chart", which takes a lot of time and effort to assemble, disassemble, sort, file, and so on (trust me, I know first hand). Paperwork has inherent weaknesses like poor durability (surgical tape works wonders for sticking torn paper back together) and bad handwriting (stereotype of doctors is true).

With a set of these, I can imagine a completely digital set of patient records in the hospital that's stored on a server, not in a bunch of filing cabinets. The triage nurse (or paramedic, or EMT) can enter in all their symptoms with pictures for evidence, and the file can be called up at any time by any other tablet (working wirelessly with the hospital network). Doctors can easily update patient information at their leisure without having to search for the chart first. Plus, since it's digital, multiple people can access the same data at the same time. When patients are transferred between departments (or even between hospitals), there's no hassle with finding and sending their chart with them, the other department can pull up the record instantly without any hassles (and without sending a poor volunteer sprinting across the hospital to deliver the paperwork). ;)

All in all, this would really be quite a useful piece of equipment for a modern hospital, but only if it can be fully integrated with a wireless patient information database.

Hmm... Since I work for Cerner as a software engineer, I figure i'd chime in on this. Unfortunately, this device will change jack squat until our healthcare providers bring themselves online as Tim said.

Also throwing excel and word on a tablet though won't change anything.

A unified Hospital management system is needed (Packages my company makes, and it works very very well) to push/route orders in realtime from hospital pharmacies, labs, nurses, secretaries, doctors, and surgeons among a billion other patient data and insurance and medical history, drug allergies and reactions, and even existing best practices. Software systems like this exists now has proven itself in real world practice to significantly reduce accidents, mortality rates, ER response time, patient stay length! But a system like this is quite beefy, and I can tell you from the specs of this thing it would probably be less than useful for it's price.

I'm very glad to see a step in a good direction. Hopefully health care providers will continue to see the value in computerizing their operations

Crx1990 Posted Feb 21st 2007 8:55AM

Neutral

I work for a company that sells EMR= Electronic medical records software and we also sell motion tablets with it and this should be great for the software we sell. We are going to order one of these once available and will test it vigorusly as it seems it could be handy. We do not sell to hospitals as the previous poster said their systems are very robust and need a lot to run on but frommy little experience with software in hospitals they could still use this with some of the more common and larger hospital internal software as they have been custom designed to to load on portable devices as tablets and even pda. I know the cleveland clinic down here is south florida has such a system but a lot of docs are computer shy so it has not taken off like they would want it.