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Australian State Govt. To Fund iPads For Doctors
angry tapir writes "The current premier of the Australian state of Victoria, John Brumby, has promised every doctor in Victoria's public hospital system would be issued with an Apple iPad if his incumbent Labor Government was returned to power in the state's upcoming election."
That MB Games had released Operation for the iPad ...
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
This really shouldn't be a story, the likely case is the Labor government wont return to power at all.
If they do it will be with the Greens holding a deciding vote in policy and given their position to reckless spending like this they'd harpoon the idea anyway. This would be news if in three months time doctors were actually being given iPads to do their work via.
I ate your fish.
because iPads save lives..
his party was committed to giving doctors the tools they needed to provide the best care to Victorian patients.
Having done a few projects with medical institutions of various sizes, my impression is that there are quite a lot of stringent and rather divergent requirements for "tools they need to provide the best care" depending on the specialty, in addition to a ton of general and institution-specific requirements regarding, between others, payments, data security and privacy.
Giving everyone an iPad doesn't strike me like a policy implementation in response to a specific need, but rather as trying to win an influential group with shiny presents.
Are the doctors going to bite on such a small bait?
Lord I hope they are using a web interface otherwise they'll have to deal with the insanity of the AppStore (app gets rejected, never updated, etc. Don't get me wrong, I love my iPad but I really don't want to rely on apps (since they might get revoked/etc.) at least with web based interfaces you can replace the client quite easily.
He is promising iPads because they are popular and people want them. Moreover, they know what one is.
And Apple doesn't control enterprise stuff, which is likely what a hospital would use.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/355318/ipads_go_under_knife_victorian_hospitals/
Looks like this has been floating around for a good while.
I ate your fish.
Sounds fair they should go to tender and be fair to all the other tablet pcs and not mention "ipad" directly. Chances are the idea won't fly anyway so there will never be ipads to complain about, people know what an ipad is not a tablet PC this is an election stunt :\
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
I'm a Victorian but I have only been skimming the news. Basically our politicians are saying whatever they think might help them get [re]elected even if it sounds totally stupid. For example the Liberal party is proposing to build train lines in metropolitan Melbourne. In my 45 years of living in this city the only thing the Liberals have done with trains is close them down (and then Labor reopen them), so a Liberal politician who says he is going to build a train line is clearly talking crap.
The iPads will be forgotten on the Sunday morning after the Saturday election.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
only Apple approved bacterium will iNFECT you
Is this kind of thing legal?
Why wouldn't it be?
Also, do you want Apple to control what kind of software your health care system can use?
Apple does not "control what kind of software [they] can use". It's also extremely unlikely there are any legitimate medical apps that are being outright rejected from Apple's store (which, contrary to popular misconception, is not the only official way to distribute iOS apps).
Isn't this basically buying votes (with Tax Payer money). I know some one has a quote out there about taking money from people and giving it back can't remember who though.
You would hope he at least did a Google search for tablet pc before choosing iPads. It seams that been first to market is the key these days.
If taxation is legalized theft, then Capitalism is a prolonged rape followed by a slow death.
They should specify standards that multiple competing products can comply with. How can anybody but Apple win this under a competitive tender?
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Reminds me of Kavka's toxin puzzle. ...the Political Manifesto. Before an election, a political party will release a written document outlining their policies and plans should they win office. Many of these promises may be difficult or impossible to implement in practice. Having won, the party is not obligated to follow the manifesto even if they would have lost without it.
Senthil
Winning elections... ? There's an app for that.
No left turn unstoned.
Aborigens are bouth again with shiny objects...
The sad thing is that is the way it works... I work at an hospital and what the doctors understand more is how cool is the new gadget/pc (and how nobody that is not a doctor cannot have a cooler gadget, no matter its function). The fact that there must be an IS behind in order to these gadgets to be useful is secondary, at best.
.
Why can't
In my own country (and I am sure in most others) there have been countless reports of massive cost overruns in the medical sector due to systems implementation issues, specifically, a) making systems talk to each other in the right way, b) making systems display the right information in the right format that has in a) been retrieved in the right way, and probably c) security.
To integrate iPads into a hospital area will take a ton of development time just to make the right apps. You cannot have an iPad lock up or crash when you have an emergency patient on the table. If that happens, who gets sued - the hospital, the politicians, or Apple? Then there is compatibility, and then there is security - A&E areas have a ton of people walking in and out, and after a drunken night it would be a small action for anyone to swipe one and stick it under their coat. Great if that just displays the last patient's test results. Then lastly you would at every step have to deal with and within Apple's terms.
I am not saying that there isn't a place for tablets in hospitals, but by god, if we spend billions on researching a single incremental drug, maybe we could spend a little bit of money researching the right tools for doctors which arguably are even more important.
I'm curious as to the reason why "so they have easy access to time-critical clinical information at a patient’s bedside" REQUIRES an iPad, and not anything else.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Everything the candidates say at this point is pandering. Doctors represent a block of typically right wing (Liberal party) voters and donors. Appealing to doctors can potentially have a direct affect on Liberal votes.
But I don't think it will make much of a difference. The campaign is on autopilot. Candidates are promising the exact opposite of their historical positions. In my experience the bureaucracy runs the state anyway so it doesn't really matter who wins.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The main problem is any tablet with a capacitive screen is basically useless for real work.
You need pen/stylus input to sign, take "handwriting to text" notes and annotate documents.
An ipad is even more useless, it is a glorified media player and web device.
It frustrates me that Apples popularity and marketing has made the capacitive screen a must have feature , it is less versatile and accurate than the alternative, it is however perfectly suited to small touch input devices like media players and phones - not devices requiring a real variety of input.
I suggest that if an iPad is indeed critical business tool for a Doctor, he might be able to spring for the six hundred bucks without too much trouble.
He doesn't need John Brumby to buy it for him (or her). In contrast, there are plenty of school kids who could use that sort of investment in technology. Perhaps some of the billions of dollars that were wasted on the latest Public transport fiasco could be spent there.
Investment in health care needs more serious consideration than simply buying the doctors more shiny objects.
sure. they're the last people who could afford it. riiiighhttt......
I was going to vote for Labour until I read this, I don't want any part in filling Apple's coffers any further.
Giving everyone an iPad doesn't strike me like a policy implementation in response to a specific need, but rather as trying to win an influential group with shiny presents.
Outside of Slashdot's event horizon, many companies have already issued large number of iPads to their employees for specific purposes, and very successfully so. Very often with purpose written applications that don't go through Apple's app store (shell out a little bit more than the usual $99 for an "enterprise" developer account and you can install iPhone and iPad apps from your own servers). I don't make lists of this stuff, just use Google, but I remember Daimler Benz issuing iPads to their sales people very successfully.
The App Store isn't the only way to get apps onto iOS devices.
Read up about Enterprise distribution of applications without the app store.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Guide.pdf
Page 63:
You can distribute iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad applications to your users.
If you want to install iPhone OS applications that you’ve developed, you distribute the application to your users, who install the applications using iTunes.
Applications from the online App Store work on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad without any additional steps. If you develop an application that you want to distribute yourself, it must be digitally signed with a certificate issued by Apple. You must also provide your users with a distribution provisioning profile that allows their device to use the application.
The process for deploying your own applications is:
Register for enterprise development with Apple.
Sign your applications using your certificate.
Create an enterprise distribution provisioning profile that authorizes devices to use applications you’ve signed.
Deploy the application and the enterprise distribution provisioning profile to your users’ computers.
Instruct users to install the application and profile using iTunes.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
a apple a day. im gonna go sit in the corner now.
Dear John Brumby, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
I love tech, but this is batshit crazy in my opinion. Fix the underlying issues w/health. iPads won't.
If not for the cool-factor, is there a reason for giving iPads to the doctors instead of some other pad?
It is what it is.
many companies have already issued large number of iPads to their employees for specific purposes, and very successfully so
Yes, this kind of underlines the seeming pointlessness of the discussed political initiative. iPads are promised without a specific purpose and application in mind.
no. and where they need such data input, they already have pads.
and most of these cases of shelling out large numbers of ipads to representatives comes out the fact that those decisions were sold to them by advertising agencies(which are pretty good at building special apps that serve no purpose, typical case would be issuing them for one trade show, using them as information displays there,instead of printing the text out in a form you could give the attendees to take home, and then just forgetting about them).
it's just riding the hype for getting press time.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Why is this a story?
In Oz we call an unimplemented election promise a "non-core promise", John Howard coined the term. I live in Victoria and personally I really don't give a flying fuck if they do or don't spend a paltry $12M on ipads, I'm just gratefull we have bipartisan support for universal health care.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I was just reading an article in the Philadelphia Business Journal this morning about the switch to electronic medical records, and it said one thing they've found from experience is that a desktop computer with a mouse is much more convenient for the doctor than mobile/touch devices. I would provide a link but it is subscriber-only, so the PBJ losses an opportunity for some traffic.
Sounds more like a case of Bread and Circuses to me (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses).
More seriously, what the hell problem is this politician even trying to address by handing out iPads? If doctors want access to a patients medical info, it's likely there is clipboard on the bed which has it and failing that a duty station on the ward where it could be accessed. Expecting doctors to haul around a fragile computer (and remember to charge it) is just asking for trouble. They'll be forgotten, broken (when they slide off beds), they'll be implicated with the spread of germs and carry all sorts of other baggage. I also expect that wifi enabling every public and private hospital ward is easier said than done for a whole raft of reasons.
I agree it does seem an odd choice of vendor, however many other options (MS Google) could be just as constraining if they choose to write software for them.
Whatever hardware they use, it'd be silly to tie their systems to binaries for one platform anyway. If they serve their data using HTML it won't matter what hardware they use as they can easily change it later. Tablets could actually be a very useful tool in hospitals if used well.
If not for the cool-factor, is there a reason for giving iPads to the doctors instead of some other pad?
As someone who has studied medicine, and worked a bit in the clinic (although now I mainly do research, I still have to work as a military doctor, thanks to Switzerland having such an antiquated concept as a "compulsory military service")
let me say to you :
We are completely dependant on electronic assisting devices. Long before Apple even started marketing mere music player (let alone PDA/smartphone capable devices) PDA such as Palms and Psions have been immensely popular among my peers.
There's an overwhelming quantity of applications :
- General PIM applications : Notes (so you can easily carry your personal schemas, recommendations, memory aids, etc.), calendar, address book
- Lots of reference material (and it's much practical to carry around 1 single PDA, rather than the equivalent amount of books. Specially since some, like drugs compendiums aren't pocket-sized at all but look like dictionaries)
- Assisting applications (formula calculators, patient tracking/note taking, etc.)
- There are even advanced medical application running on iOS like radiology displaying apps (OsiriX). So you can directly show X-Rays on your device (bedside!) instead of having to log onto a nearby computer or even worse - rely only on expensive X-Ray films.
And that's only the software and data which is useful to a single person alone, now factor in that if some platform is widespread, you can even start developing applications which are useful at the hospital level (dictation software inside the PDA which can then automatically send the dictated report over the network ; a network client could access the patient's file when you need to lookup results or history again bedside!).
So yes, providing electronics to doctors *do* help them, and making a *single specific* platform available in all hospital help the hospital itself (the hospitals could start using an iPad-based dictation, use the iPad as device to display X-Ray pics).
Only, I would prefer a more pocket-able form factor than a tablet. That's why I still used Palm PDAs until recently, and now switched to a smartphones (a PalmPre), although the tablet form factor would be more useful to display x-ray pics.
Also, I would prefer a less vendor-controlled device. That's why my smartphone runs WebOS (Konami code for the win !)
Last but not least, compared to other tablets, the iPad is just an oversize iPod Touch. What I mean is that it lacks some important elements like a USB or SDIO port to interface with chip-cards (for log-in/access control, as done on desktops).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The reason it should not be legal is that it is a promise to buy from a particular supplier. It would be OK (not necessarily good policy, but not wrong in the same way) for him to promise to buy tablets from whichever vendor offered the best deal on suitable hardware and software.
It has an OS that is specifically written/modified to run on a touch based device, iOS have its entire UI running on the GPU while the CPU issues relatively small drawing calls. So far the other pads, PDAs and smartphones does not. Maybe Windows phone 7 OS is rewritten from scratch, but the older is not. I think they use a hardware accelerated layer on top of the old stuff so you get sweet animations in the initial use, but once you go browsing or managing files you use an old non accelerated portion of the system. Android OS and symbian is not hardware accelerated and they are noticeably jerkier than iOS.
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
Oh, I don't think it's that they're subsidizing doctors, who can, without some sort of strange circumstances, afford to purchase an iPad. The upper-middle class does not need any subsidies, thank you very much. They're subsidizing Steve Jobs, who, being one of the richest people in the world, is in desperate need of government support.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
...and people criticize Linux for putting too many burdens on it's end users.
If you need an "enterprise deployment guide" to just lay out the basics, then you've failed. You've also demonstrated the OPs point.
Not every doctor has an "Enterprise Support Team" to fall back on.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Are you saying he's specifically trying to court the vote of doctors? I find that unlikely - there can't possibly be enough doctors spread around the country to sway the vote, even if he outright bought their votes for dollars (not to mention it's likely to annoy other people working with the doctors who then might vote elsewhere). Mind you, I'm not sure offering to pour money into flashy tablets is the right way to win votes either, unless there have been conclusive tests to show significant gains from doing so, and as GP said, why he'd specifically say iPads when a standard tablet PC is more likely to be easier to integrate with the hospital's current systems and to be able to install custom applications (especially if Aus is anything like the UK, where Windows is pretty much the only option in hospitals). Are we missing the real message or is this just a case of clueless politician tries to piggyback on the popularity of a new tech toy?
Indeed, unless there's only one supplier who offers to meet some specific need, I would have thought it would be a legal requirement to put such requests out to tender, otherwise you're just asking for even more corruption and nepertism.
You're right that tying yourself to a vendor will lead to constraints. It's worth noting, though, that many hospitals are already (as with many government departments) tied to MS and Windows - at least this seems to be the case in most developed countries, I'd be surprised to learn all Australian hospitals were using Linux or OSX. Therefore it makes sense that the hardware at the very least doesn't prevent a Windows installation. Is this just another case of politician doesn't understand that not all tablets are iPads (arguably the iPad is not a tablet but let's shelve that for now), just like not all smartphones are iPhones and not all portable music players are iPods, hence he's using the wrong terminology through ignorance rather than preference?
Enterprise apps can be distributed without the app store.
The only burden on the end user is to select the app for installation in iTunes and their is even a way to automate that. All the other steps are for the developer.
I think there's a pretty good chance this will cost him more votes than it gains him.
Really, the only votes this will get him is from apple fanbois that care more about their favourite brand than wasteful spending.
People who care about spending, or dislike apple (Which while less outspoken I think are still a majority) won't vote for him because of this, I'd think.
And, in Australia, everyone has to vote, unlike the USA where it's optional, which changes the demographics of voters from just the 'politically minded' to 'everyone', which needs to be taken into consideration.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
As if doctors couldn't afford their own iPad? They aren't that useful in a hospital setting anyways. I work in an IT department for a hospital (~6000 total employees) and while we find that several top executives are trying to push for being able to do more hospital stuff on their iPad, we were never able to justify, on a cost-to-benefit analysis, buying more than 2 iPads, and that was so our current web developers could run compatibility tests (not actually building anything for it, just tweaking existing web pages). They add zero functionality. We already have systems in place that do everything the "iPad pushers" want, and they do it quite well.
No, there is no "-1 I'LL NEVER ADMIT BEING WRONG!!!" mod.
Well, any doctor that wants to use enterprise software probably does have an IT team to fall back on. This actually seems pretty straightforward and usable. They (doctors) are going to need to have a system with a traceable security path so having applications with signed certs is needed. Otherwise, it looks like a fairly simple method of distributing software across many "workstations".
The reason it should not be legal is that it is a promise to buy from a particular supplier. It would be OK (not necessarily good policy, but not wrong in the same way) for him to promise to buy tablets from whichever vendor offered the best deal on suitable hardware and software.
I still don't see why that would be illegal (let alone wrong). He's not making a promise to Apple, he's making it to his constituents.
As for the idea of him instead saying, "tablets from whoever will offer the best deal", right now that is the iPad. There are no other tablets that can reasonably be said to compete with the iPad. The closest thing is the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which is more expensive, smaller, less storage...
Basically, "the best tablet" just means iPad anyway, and will for some time to come. A vocal number of Slashdotters seem to think that the iPad is overpriced and underpowered, but half a year later not a single competitor has been able to match it, and there's no reason to expect that to change any time soon. Apple will have released the second iPad before the competition has even caught up with the first.
You might want an open source OS, or multiple app stores, but I can promise you those aren't important to the vast majority of consumers, and a hospital is not going to care either.
So, I'm still curious on how this can be illegal. I mean, other than "I don't like anyone promising to buy something in government".
Did you actually read the guide?
Here's what you, as the end user, needs to do (hilighted in bold)
The process for deploying your own applications is:
Register for enterprise development with Apple.
Sign your applications using your certificate.
Create an enterprise distribution provisioning profile that authorizes devices to use applications you’ve signed.
Deploy the application and the enterprise distribution provisioning profile to your users’ computers.
Instruct users to install the application and profile using iTunes.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
I am sick and tired of the people talking about cost of hardware as being important in the case of desktops/laptops but it is even more ludicrous when the iPad is "cheaper" than the competition right now for what you get in the entire package.
Let me inject a little bit reality into the situation. It does not matter whether a desktop costs 500, 1000, 2000 or even 5000. What matters is the TCO which includes how many man hours are required to support that desktop and similar desktops through the enterprise. It is dead easy to lock down a mac desktop without having to go through a "lock down" procedure by simply assigning users regular user status on the system. They can even install some simple applications in their own home folder Applications without administrators having to worry about it bring down the entire system. If a home folder becomes corrupt, you simply restore from a nightly backup using one of many third party solutions like deep freeze.
For every additional IT personnel that you hire to handle windows problems, you could buy a lot of macs and upgrade them every single year.
Wages are the largest expense in any organization so when you are choosing your IT solution, you should factor in how much it will cost to support it. Saving 10,000 dollars on hardware while wasting 500,000 or more on extra bodies to support that "cheap" hardware is a false economy.
The iPad is really the best platform for doctors on rounds.
It is small, light weight, can display hi-res images therefor great for viewing radiology images and can have lots and lots of other things built right in.
While I really like the iPad Apples needs to change one thing. They need to get rid of that fragile connector. It is way to thin for the amount of average that can be applied by the cable. I promise a Doctor will break the damn thing in a heartbeat.
Apple needs to make the connections inductive since everything running through that connection oscillates it should be very simple. They only other thing they need to do is either make the recharge inductive as well or make the power connector the same as the laptops then make so that when sleepy tired doctor grabs the thing it will simply pop loose without them noticing.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I work in a hospital. We've been playing a little with using iphone type devices, and you can use the capacitive touch screen whilst wearing standard surgical gloves, seems to be no problem. We have been playing with a number of windows based tablet devices specifically designed for a clinical environment, that use a pen interface, however due to there bulk, they all seem to end up being attached to a wall permanently and used there. You would get a lot more out of a desktop computer mounted in the same way. I can see a number of situations where a smaller IPad type device would be useful, however you need to start with a use (problem) and look for a solution, rather than take the technology and look for a way to justify having it. Just throwing an iPad a doctors will do nothing unless you have a comprehensive plan on how it will integrate with existing systems. This can be done, and should be done, but it will be expensive and time consuming.