Apple Netbook Rumors and Potential for the Healthcare Industry
Posted on 22 April 2009, at 12:25 pm, by Michael Anderson
When you ask most techno-nuts about the possibility of an Apple Netbook with a touch-screen, they tend to look much like Lieutenant Frank Drebin from the TV show Police Squad as he frothed at the mouth while questioning a dentist. The reasons are simple and manifold – Apple has a reputation for excellent and innovative notebooks starting from the original Powerbooks in 1991, their OS X is a highly regarded operating system that has shown itself to be highly scalable, and they also have done a great job infiltrating existing markets with high quality products and making a massive impact.
There have been rumors of an Apple Netbook since … well, since the cancellation of the Apple eMate (Newton clamshell with keyboard)! There has been a small-ish Apple Powerbook in the form of the 12″ G4 (which I personally adored), but Apple has been unwilling to compromise on the feature set of a notebook recently despite innovating ultra-portables with the Powerbook Duo.
Recently, with the successful emergence of an entire class of ’second generation’ netbooks based on the Intel Atom processor, these rumors have been getting more frequent and ‘authoritative’. This week we’ve seen some more based on supposed manufacturing contracts with Chinese company FoxConn Electronics.
According to the report “Apple’s MacBook is already set to become Foxconn’s big boost to notebook shipment growth in Q209. In the past, Foxconn has been contracted by the likes of Dell and HP and has done work for Apple on the Iphone.
The rumours come at a time when speculation is rife about Apple introducing a new multimedia device to take up an intermediary niche between the Iphone and Mac notebooks. Apple is keeping tight lipped about its plans, issuing a terse “no comment”, but the word on the Asian streets is that the device will be some sort of 10-inch touch screen netbook. Whispers suggest Apple will attempt to market the device as a portable gadget for reading e-books, connecting to the Interwarble and watching films.”
So why is this most recent rumor any different? It really isn’t, but the reality is that as the iPhone and iPod Touch have matured and been adopted in the market for a variety of non-phone and non-iPod uses, people have been thinking of the potential utility of a larger touch-screen netbook with a full OS X installation. An excellent article about a potential use of an Apple netbook as an electronic medical records (EMR) interface device. Take a look at the full article here.
Some thoughts from the article:
“An Apple tablet would be the ultimate UI for electronic medical records. With a touch-screen display like the iPhone, using the EMR during an encounter would be simplified.”
“Using the iPhone’s intelligent keyboard technology, the device could have a very sophisticated automatic coding tool. Some EMRs can already auto-generate E&M codes based on information collected during the patient encounter. Combine this with the iPhone’s keyboard word suggestion tool, and physicians could rapidly select codes.”
“A large-scale and fully-functional version of the iPhone could also lure third party developers. As of March 26th, there were 30,000 third party iPhone applications. Think how many more a Mac Tablet would attract; we could certainly expect to see some innovative mash-ups. Here’s one for starters: using Google search by voice, physicians could recite a disease into the Mac Tablet, then receive a list of diagnosis codes. This would be especially useful as there are thousands of diagnosis codes and many of them are revised on a regular basis.”
Of course, it isn’t all a rose-covered path, as also noted:
“While there are a handful of EMRs designed for Macs, none of the major players currently support Mac OS. Furthermore, web-based EMR vendors have yet to optimize their product for Apple’s Safari browser. So even those that have the easiest path to Mac compatibility haven’t done it yet. EMR vendors need to jump on this opportunity by building compatibility with Safari or by building the tablet equivalent of an iPhone application when the Mac Tablet is released.”
But the article presents a strong case for a robust and highly integrated touch screen device with serious computing capabilities and a number of convergence features for use as an enabling technology for improving a critical area – in this case, real-time health care. Certainly there are other areas within health care that would benefit from such a device, as well as many other industries. Now we just have to hope that Apple builds it.
Sources: The Inquirer and Software Advice
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