Health IT Industry Snipes at iPad

While health-care professionals seem to love iPads, health IT professionals are less enamored with the consumer-friendly tablet computers, according to a new industry report.

Doctors and others are more likely to use technology they like, which could help chief information officers get everyone on board in using electronic health records and other health IT systems. But iPads in particular are challenging to integrate into existing health IT, according to the report from BizTechReports, "Diagnosis Danger: Governance and Security Issues Cause IT Concerns About iPad in Healthcare Settings."

"There is a sense of concern among healthcare IT executives that pressure to meet the demands of end-users to support consumer-grade computing and communications devices like the iPad is coming at the expense of other important priorities," the researchers reported.

Areas of concern reported by the 100 hospital and clinic CIOs and other health IT executives interviewed by BizTechReports, an independent, Washington, D.C.-based research group, include:

• Compliance with privacy governance requirements.
• The need to manage risk while sharing health information with other users.
• The ability to quickly react to and remediate data breaches.
• Integration with end-to-end productivity systems.

For example, electronic patient records are not meant to be managed on consumer-grade technology like the iPad, according to the report. It's also difficult to enter information from an iPad into an enterprise system like an EHR. Nor do iPads have mechanical keyboards or USB ports that can attach devices such as barcode scanners, severely limiting the number of applications they can support.

Panasonic Solutions Co. teamed with BizTechReports to produce the study.