Role of Small Form Factor Devices Underestimated Today!

Many EHR adoption failures can be laid at the feet of User Interfaces at the Point Of Care. Many physicians and nurses never get used to doing their work somewhat differently from the way it was done before with pen and paper!

I was a member of Kaiser Permanente, before EHR rollout and after EHR rollout! Forget the caregivers, I was very disturbed as a patient when my Physician kept turning away from me every two minutes to type something into the EHR on the desktop that was suspended from the ceiling! I can understand how the Physician can feel that this has changed the way they deliver medical care!

This is where small form factor devices could come in handy and could solve some of these problems but they are totally underestimated today!

Devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch are very easy and natural for physicians and nurses to use and it’s only a matter of time before these devices take over a lot of the EHR functions piece by piece!

If you are a nurse taking a patient’s vitals you just need that screen where you type in the details and record them. You don’t need the whole kit and kaboodle of the EHR user interface!

iPhones, iPodTouches and other SmartPhones may already be replacing pagers in healthcare! With processors becoming faster, these devices becoming less expensive, it’s only a matter of time that they get adopted quickly!

If these are woefully inadequate, there are always these rumors of a midsize iTablet device from Apple! 

Small form factor devices are coming! Good EHR software vendors seem to be working on these small form device interfaces already!