It turns out that doctors and medical residents may now represent a new niche market for Apple iPads. A new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that when 115 internal medicine residents from the University of Chicago were given the tablet computers for four months, they reported that the devices saved them about an hour of work per day. Ninety percent of the residents also said they used the tablets to help with work, including accessing patient medical records, the hospital s paging system, and medical publications.
Researchers also found that the iPads increased orders placed before 7 a.m. rounds by 5 percent, and that 8 percent more orders were placed before residents were scheduled to leave the hospital.
The implementation of personal mobile computing was associated with improvements in both perceived and actual resident efficiency, the authors wrote.
ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross thinks that adding iPads to hospitals is a nifty and efficient advancement in patient care. Now doctors can spend less time waiting for a computer in the charting area, and they also have easy access for writing orders. Hopefully, he says, this will translate to devoting more time to patients.