Slashdot Mirror
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!
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?
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
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).
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.
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.
iPads save(s) Jobs... there, fixed that for you..
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
No, in an enterprise environment (or anywhere else really for that matter) you are free to sign up as a developer, get a developer signing certificate and deploy apps to iOS devices under your control and these apps don't have to go anywhere near the app store.
Have a look starting at page 63 here:
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Guide.pdf
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
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.
Like the quality of your post, the opposition in the state and federal parliaments is a waste of time. If Baillieu was any good he'd win this election hands down over the horrific failure by the Brumby government regarding the bush fires. Instead we get yet another Liberal scare campaign, when they could be getting down to real issues.
My reference to reckless spending is regarding the Myki system which cost a billion dollars, and counting, to replace a system that wasn't broken. Worse still, the Metcard system it replaced is still required and the public transport network is still unreliable!
If you consider a billion dollars in context: We could have just had free public transport for 1-3 years without a single ticket instead of this failure. That's based on back of a napkin maths but a billion dollars buys a lot of zone 1 dailies. And it's not the only waste I can point to.
I ate your fish.
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.
Tablet PCs have been around for nearly 10 years. Apple wasn't the first to market with a pad/tablet. They were first to market with one that people actually wanted to buy.
Why does it make sense for large organisations to buy iPads rather than another tablet? For the same reason it makes sense for them to buy Windows PCs as desktops. Because they are the market leader, which means most tablet software will be released for it, most tablet hardware add-ons will be compatible with it, and they can be sure that iPads will be on the market, and fully supported, for a very long time.
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.
...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.
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.
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 don't consider this reckless spending. the iPad is in use in many hospitals in the US by providers, not as a toy, but in real useful ways.
In our case, because there is a Citrix plugin for the iPad, providers can log into our informatics system on an iPad via wireless and do basically anything they can do from the PC they normally use. Place orders, view results, read documentation, more or less anything.
Because the iPhone uses the same plugin, they can use those in a pinch too, say from the golf course or what have you.
These devices may not seem to fill a niche in our homes that isn't already covered for most people, but they can provide a lot of flexibility and function in health care.