Actually, it was a Nurse Practitioner named Gail who saw me. But I saw today what should be the future of the iPad. See, I go to Kaiser, who I largely think are a bunch of incompetents, except in one very specific and useful area: electronic medical records. Everyone I see at Kaiser can pull up my entire medical records. They can grab X-rays or MRI, test results, etc.
How badass would it be to have an iPad tied into that? I know that HIPAA probably forbids wireless data transmissions (seriously they do fiber to all the workstations and then use an ethernet transceiver to do the last 12” of data there, I assume that’s security, but it might just be convenience) or some other absurdity like that, but how sweet would it be for the nurse to pull up your EMR on an iPad and use multitouch to manipulate the X-ray (which she could already do with the scroll wheel, but she had to do a lot more clicking around to get where she wanted. Pinch & Pull and wow, you’re there.
There was talk of this before when App Development first came to the iPhone, and I suspect that this never came to much because of the size of the iPhone. Hard to see good detail on a screen that small. Now? I think this could be an awesome tool. Here’s hoping someone actually does it.
