1266 Last week, during the fever pitch surrounding the announcement of Apple's iPad tablet, spokesman Chris Thorman says Software Advice surveyed 178 physicians, nurses, medical students and healthcare IT professionals about what the healthcare industry's ideal tablet would look like. This isn't our first time talking tablets and healthcare. In April of last year, we wondered if the Apple tablet would become the ideal device to run electronic health record (EMR) software.

The goal with this survey was to find out what healthcare professionals want in a tablet and how well Apple's iPad fulfills those wants.

Things learned from from the survey results include:

Majority of Healthcare Professionals Are Likely to Buy a Tablet

This chart shows how likely respondents are to purchase a tablet for healthcare use in the next year.

Tablet Tasks

This chart shows what percentage of respondents want to use a tablet for a particular task.This chart shows what percentage of respondents want to use a tablet for a particular task.

Ease of Use and Software Selection are Top Reasons for Tablet Selection

According to survey results, ease of use is the major purchase reason for a majority of healthcare professionals. That may fare well for the iPad. Why? The iPad runs on the iPhone operating system, and thousands of doctors are already using iPhones in clinical settings. In addition, the iPad has a finger touchscreen, and of the survey's healthcare respondents, 63% said they preferred a finger touchscreen over styluses and voice dictation when asked about their data input preference. Many of those same people said that the speed of the data entry was the determining factor when noting a preference for the finger touchscreen.

On the downside, in terms of medical software selection, the iPad lags far behind virtually every other tablet on the market. Despite having over 5,000 medical apps immediately available for download through Apple's App Store, none of those apps are a functional EMR system or even remotely close to one. The vast majority of EMR software on the market today will not run on a Mac OSX operating system. Most require a Windows-based operating system to function.

The iPad may have an easy to use operating system helped by a finger touchscreen but those pros are nullified by that system's inability to run the vast majority of medical software on the market today.

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