Actually my hospital is on the very verge of testing with tablets. Currently we are using a rolling cart from Tremont Medical. These devices were a fair disappointment.
Our previous endeavour consisted of Pentium2 generation Toshiba laptops mounted on carts with a secondary (read: car) battery attached for extended battery life.
We are moving to tablets now most likely by Motion Computing conbined with an external gel battery. We have seen 10-12 hour run times with load on the disk/processor/wlan with this combination in testing.
Not to sound like a sales post, but I wanted to you to have some background.
I work at a 100 bed hospital which has recently introduced nurse/patient/medication barcode scanning to ensure accuracy (and logging) as well as monitor drug conflicts blah blah blah. This establishes our need for a machine that can be mobile and work a 12 hour shift.
The tremonts were a bust with the I.S. department because of their extremely poor hardware designs that only became evident several months after break in. The power supplies will blow up and send a nice 30 volts across the motherboard, significant problems with incompatibilities with Cisco Aironet equipment, terrible almost nonexistent customer support. The nursing staff greatly dislikes the weight of the tremont, especially at the end of a 12 hour shift. In compromise we have located a lighter weight cart that combines a tablet pc (fixed like the laptops were) with a full size keyboard/mouse and a sleeve to put the gel battery in, as well as room for a chart, the barcode scanner and a cabinet with drawers to store the meds in as well as alcohol wipeys, needles, pill cups etc...
The nurses are willing to exchange an external battery and take responsibility for the charging. It only takes a day or two of 5-6 nurses sharing the only machine that *is* charged for them to decide to make sure everything is always charged. The walls on each floor are lined at the nursing station with the laptops in between the times when drugs are administered to do a catch up charge with a battery swap to occur at shift change. Our nurses also do a heavy amount of documentation electronically, and copious amounts of email so these arent' just used for medication dispensing.
To address the pen issue. In our case there aren't enough hands free to carry a chart, scan 3 sets of barcodes and whatnot, so the Tablet isnt' carried by hand, but rolled around, and the pens aren't even going to go out with them.
We realize that you can't nurse proof anything, but try to make it as nurse resistant as possible and have been lucky with spills mostly affecting keyboard/mouse and not actual systems.
The footprint of the carts we will be using is very small, and allows easy access to tight corners in rooms.
They are made by Datavision. They built a new clamshell to mount the larger Motion Tablet on and it arrived this week and was a very nice fit.
This design was a hit with the nurses because of the extra room created by having a lower keyboard tray and the reduced weight. These carts are pretty stable, I haven't managed to knock one over yet. The tablet is secured by a keyed allen screw which can be defeated, but it's better than a phillips headed screw.
Anyhow, that's my take on it, email me if you have any questions or anything.
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Actually my hospital is on the very verge of testing with tablets. Currently we are using a rolling cart from Tremont Medical. These devices were a fair disappointment.
Our previous endeavour consisted of Pentium2 generation Toshiba laptops mounted on carts with a secondary (read: car) battery attached for extended battery life.
We are moving to tablets now most likely by Motion Computing conbined with an external gel battery. We have seen 10-12 hour run times with load on the disk/processor/wlan with this combination in testing.
Not to sound like a sales post, but I wanted to you to have some background.
I work at a 100 bed hospital which has recently introduced nurse/patient/medication barcode scanning to ensure accuracy (and logging) as well as monitor drug conflicts blah blah blah. This establishes our need for a machine that can be mobile and work a 12 hour shift.
The tremonts were a bust with the I.S. department because of their extremely poor hardware designs that only became evident several months after break in. The power supplies will blow up and send a nice 30 volts across the motherboard, significant problems with incompatibilities with Cisco Aironet equipment, terrible almost nonexistent customer support. The nursing staff greatly dislikes the weight of the tremont, especially at the end of a 12 hour shift. In compromise we have located a lighter weight cart that combines a tablet pc (fixed like the laptops were) with a full size keyboard/mouse and a sleeve to put the gel battery in, as well as room for a chart, the barcode scanner and a cabinet with drawers to store the meds in as well as alcohol wipeys, needles, pill cups etc...
The nurses are willing to exchange an external battery and take responsibility for the charging. It only takes a day or two of 5-6 nurses sharing the only machine that *is* charged for them to decide to make sure everything is always charged. The walls on each floor are lined at the nursing station with the laptops in between the times when drugs are administered to do a catch up charge with a battery swap to occur at shift change. Our nurses also do a heavy amount of documentation electronically, and copious amounts of email so these arent' just used for medication dispensing.
To address the pen issue. In our case there aren't enough hands free to carry a chart, scan 3 sets of barcodes and whatnot, so the Tablet isnt' carried by hand, but rolled around, and the pens aren't even going to go out with them.
We realize that you can't nurse proof anything, but try to make it as nurse resistant as possible and have been lucky with spills mostly affecting keyboard/mouse and not actual systems.
The footprint of the carts we will be using is very small, and allows easy access to tight corners in rooms. They are made by Datavision. They built a new clamshell to mount the larger Motion Tablet on and it arrived this week and was a very nice fit.
This design was a hit with the nurses because of the extra room created by having a lower keyboard tray and the reduced weight. These carts are pretty stable, I haven't managed to knock one over yet. The tablet is secured by a keyed allen screw which can be defeated, but it's better than a phillips headed screw. Anyhow, that's my take on it, email me if you have any questions or anything.