Together with Stanford, University California Irvine Medical College started deploying course materials on college issued Apple iPad’s back in 2010, soon after they launched the iMed innovators group (I wonder if the Google execs involved will have this group drop the ‘i’?) and published in early 2013 that iPad use by students has boosted marks by an astonishing 23% so it’s great to see that this innovative Medical School is benefiting from it’s first mover advantage as Mobile giants clamour to collaborate with the innovative college.
In the UK we’ve seen Mobile Operators bending over backwards to get deployments of iPhones within Medical Schools so as the Google Glass brand positioning struggles I wonder how much UCIrvine was paid by Google to start trialling this tech?
For a long time I’ve been asking why Medical Councils and Indemnity Insurers aren’t mandating that Doctors have a connected smartphone loaded with up to date prescribing and textbook content as a legal requirement before they are insured to practice and I now wonder how long it will be before a Doctor isn’t allowed to work without wearing a computer (in my opinion this will happen very soon in areas of speciality practice were the cost of liability insurance premiums and time spent fighting claims are already creating significant clinician shortages).
It’s clear to me from our trials with Google Glass that the biggest impact this technology will have on healthcare will be as a result of the capacity it will provide for documentation of encounters so I wonder how Doctors who have been trained using this technology will view the undocumented world of healthcare that they’re going to be expected to spend their 40+ year careers working within. I wonder if they’ll consider the continuation of the status quo to be unthinkable?
