Utilization, among health care personnel especially doctors, has been poor resulting in many EMR projects failing initially. As the younger crop of doctors are coming in, doctors who grew up with computers, and their allied personal technology, utilization is improving.
One main obstacle to EMR utilization by doctors is the consequent alteration in their respective workflows that the system needs to impose. Instead of writing on a chart, which you can do standing, sitting, in the patient's room, at the nurse's station, or in the pantry, a traditional EMR required the doctor to sit down on a terminal, usually needing to rewrite what you had written in your tickler, and frequently competing with other doctors, nurses or students who need to use the same terminal.
An iPad that connects to the hospital's WIFI network that accesses the EMR using a web-browser-based interface, gets you as close as possible to complete EMR utilization without altering the doctor's workflow by much. Being browser-based, this makes it platform independent, allowing the doctor to access the EMR using his smartphone, tablet, or even laptop without any need for customized and installed software or a specific hardware and operating system requirement.
An article showed that one hospital piloted the use of iPads and computed it's return-of-investment (ROI) rate to be 9 days. These numbers were based on time and motion studies and how clinical workflow impacted labor costs. In other words, the iPads increased productivity allowing the staff to do more tasks with the same time as compared to their old workflow.
Unfortunately, in this country such a system isn't possible as a Hospital Information and Management System with a full-featured EMR with 100% utilization has not happened and thus an iPad solution won't fly as of yet.
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