The other day Rob Bushway pointed to a series of press releases from Intel and Motion Computing announcing their work on a new "Mobile Clinical Assistant."
If you're interested in learning more about Intel's efforts in this area, you may want to check out the Digital Health-focused keynote at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) that was given this past week. You can watch the video here (Click on the "Digital Health" keynote by Louis Burns). The discussion of the Mobile Clinical Assistant starts about the 10 minute mark.
During the presentation, Intel shows off a running unit as well as discusses the results of a pilot they just completed at El Camino hospital. Nurse Monica Hite was invited on stage to demo the unit and give discuss some of her impressions. Here's a run down of what she said:
* A stethascope is located at the top-left, but eventhough it was a good idea it didn't work so they didn't use it.
* Portability "awesome"
* Handle and weight were "great"
* Ability to log in quick was great "when it worked. Sometimes it didn't work. And we need things to be fast."
* Average age of nurses is 49 so need glasses--"screen is a little small."
* She took quick notes in Journal. (Surprisingly not OneNote!)
Intel also mentioned that they needed to work on the latency of various operations. Launch time of applications, booting up, etc must be fast.
The EMR software used in the pilot was provided by Eclipsys.
Interestingly, in the keynote speech the "Mobile Clinical Assistant" wasn't once referred to as a Tablet PC. In fact, at one point it almost sound like one of the Intel representatives on stage was going to say "Tablet" and then she interrupted herself and said "Mobile Clinical Assistant."


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