Steve Jobs got a new liver, the rest of us got an easier way to watch Hulu in bed, and the health-care industry just may have gotten the big break it needed to launch into the 21st century. Following his hush-hush surgery last spring, it's easy to imagine the colossus of Cupertino, Calif., staring at the ceiling tiles in his hospital room and wishing for a way to hop online without having to bother with a laptop.
It's also no stretch to picture him watching doctors, nurses and orderlies peck away at a bevy of poorly designed, intermittently integrated and just plain ugly devices and thinking there had to be a better way.
So while the rest of the world texts, tweets and generally fawns over the thing, that's muted compared with the reception the iPad is getting in the health-care universe.
Well, I've got doctors who show no apparent interest in using a computer and a cardiologist who blows me away every time I see him come into the examination room with a tablet computer--I want to know exactly what he's doing with that device and how it's integrated into his practice. I'm frustrated that I can't use a computer to communicate directly with my doctors, frustrated that there's no standard for sharing medical information--every practice seems to have a different kind of patient questionnaire that makes initial visits harder than they need to be. (It really bugs me that most practices I've visited insist on a questionnaire but don't make it available on the web ahead of time, so most initial visits are more time consuming than they need to be. Since I've got use of only one hand, it would be a great convenience to me o have a form I culd fill out on a computer.) It would be great if I could keep (and update) my basic information in one place and have it available in a second for me and a doctor. Here's something to look forward to in medicine and tehnology.