After the iPad successfully reintroduced the tablet computer, there has been an urgency to deliver mobile apps in the enterprise that never existed when companies were simply connecting smartphones.

While all types of industries are considering the impact of tablets on their businesses, healthcare is emerging as one of the leading areas where mobile technologies such as smartphones, sensor networks and tablets are being deployed.

The benefits of mobile in healthcare are obvious. Physicians and nurses can avoid mistakes by knowing more about the patient when they’re asked to make a decision. Doctors can use tablets to educate patients on their conditions and treatment.  

I recently spoke with Chief Medical Information Officer of Texas Health Resources Ferdinand Velasco recently spoke with me on how the evolution of mobility is creating excitement around healthcare IT. As a result of good consumer experiences with smartphones and tablets at home, Velasco said many physicians are asking IT to support access to healthcare apps and data on consumer-oriented devices. 

Currently, Texas Health Resources offers read-only access to electronic health records. Velasco told me that once his physicians had a taste of what was possible, they clamored for more. They want to perform tasks such as e-prescribing and schedule management. Velasco also mentioned that there are several useful healthcare apps in Apple’s iTunes store today.

For healthcare, privacy takes on a heightened role

One obvious area of concern is securing information and personal health records on a device that could be lost or stolen. As a result we are seeing the emergence of private clouds that store records and provide a secure tunnel to information that can be accessed from a web browser on a mobile device.

For example, AT&T announced a strategic alliance with Acuo Technologies to deliver cloud-based medical imaging storage solutions to help healthcare institutions solve their increasing data storage challenges.

And Baptist Health System and Henry Ford Health System are piloting the AT&T Medical Imaging and Information Management service that connects doctors to patients' medical images, regardless of which device originally took the image, allowing them to offer faster treatment. The solution helps providers to store, access, view and share patient medical images and information inside hospital systems and outside with referring physicians and other authorized facilities over a highly secure infrastructure.

Texas Health Resources uses a private cloud solution that allows doctors to review electronic health records as well as radiology scans. The benefits of this approach are that data will never downloaded to the device, the connection to the data is secured and the device doesn’t need massive memory and processing power to view large files like EKGs. 

Project Blue Spruce, developed in the IBM labs, is another example of this. It allows people to simultaneously interact and update content in real-time via a web browser on computers and the Apple iPad and includes video chat. Today, researchers for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are using the IBM code to help analyze health records of patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDGene®) .

Does this mean that industrial grade laptops and tablet like the Panasonic Toughbook or Motion Computing tablets are dead? Not likely. Issues such as the inability to disinfect consumer-grade mobile devices and durability of a devices still matter. In many cases, applications are Window’s based and can only be accessed via desktop virtualization software like Citrix, which negates at least a portion of the usability benefit of a consumer device.  

But increasingly, we’ll see a hybrid environment where many physicians bring their own devices to work and medical facilities will still purchase a certain amount of shared equipment.

There also isn’t a one size fits all device for healthcare. For example, a 10-inch tablet doesn’t fit in a lab coat pocket but it’s the best size for viewing medical records. And while tweener devices such as Dell’s Streak had limited success in the consumer world, it's worked well in industries such as government and healthcare.

Who knows? Perhaps Samsung’s Galaxy Note with its 5.3 inch AOMLED screen and stylus will find a new home in healthcare.