Over 120,000 doctors in the US own an iPad and doctors (even non-"hip" ones) get immediately that the iPad is the ideal platform to use in the examroom.

13% of physicians have iPads? And 1.5% of all iPads went to physicians?

Can you give us a citation of how you got that number?

The estimate is that there are less than 1 million doctors in the US. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230450690457518...

And before October 2010, about 8.25 million iPads were sold - that number is probably way outdated though. http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/07/estimates-vary-on-number-of-i...

> 13% of physicians have iPads?

anecdotal evidence from the conference of 30,000 orthopods in San Diego last week, that seems very plausible.

iPad is not the best. Massive, rapid text entry on an iPad sucks. I took an iPad and a cr48 to the a big orthopaedics conference last week, and the cr48 was the hands down winner, using nothing but qemacs. Fundamentally, on the ipad, character recognition or dictation would be best, but I can barely read my own writing sometimes! The iPad would be a lot better if the input precision was as good as the output resolution. If you've tried any drawing apps on these things, you know what I mean. Wacom tablets have much better input precision, or at least they seem to. I want Pilot G-2 0.5 mm black speed, precision, and reliability. Right now only a keyboard comes close.

Keyboards for the iPad already exist. The future is a touch screen, and an external keyboard (probably should also mention big screens, with gpus, hooked to iPhone docks, in order to offer a fully personalized desktop experience, running off your mobile device.)

CR-48 will not be able to detach from keyboard. Everything will be designed to support a touch screen interface; input devices will be external.

We are very close to launching an integrated clinical speech to text product in our iPad application that should remove the need for most typing!

Dictating the note would be huge.

Many of us have looked extensively at pads long before this, and concluded that they are not ideal. They may have other support uses.

I agree, using an iPad's touchscreen is better for information display & retrieval, than for information recording.

But I'll admit that speech-to-text has good potential for information recording, as long as it is reasonably accurate and provides an easy way to correct errors & omissions.

Before the iPad, the "state of the art" touchscreen was an 11 pound laptop with 2 hours of battery life and a reversible top-cover/"touch" screen that required a stylus to use. The iPad is a REVOLUTION in tablet computing for physicians.

Please tell me that you don't actually believe this and were just speaking for effect, as it isn't even remotely close to the truth.

The iPad was a revolution in exactly the same way the iPod was a revolution. It had a more accessible UI and made trade-offs to be a bit slicker than what was out there, but they were the right trade-offs which were needed to take it to mass appeal. It's a good product, and it will revolutionize tablet use, but not because it's a massive technical improvement.

I don't understand your comment. Hardware isn't the issue. Physicians were early adopters of a variety of devices, starting with PDAs, thence to pads quite a bit more sophisticated than your odd and ancient example, all to try to solve the same problem your platform purports to assist with.

I have before me a ~1 kg laptop with an actual keyboard on which I can type notes almost as fast as I can speak, hold in one hand as I see a patient, with speech recognition already installed, local secure printing, sensitive data that lives in my office and not on your remote server farms, a hard drive that I own, can copy and share as needed, and can keep as secure as I like, and applications which do not require constant secured access to server(s) whose reliability and security I have no control over.

I love the iPad for a bunch of stuff. I own two. I'm an early adopter of all kinds of this type technology. I love toys.

But I'm not getting the "revolution" part of this beyond, forgive me, somewhat breathless and vague marketing hype. Tablets have been around a while and not caught on with physicians for a whole variety of reasons that you folks seem oddly unaware of.

Sincerely good luck with this, but you're not solving any problems for me or any physicians I've talked to about it.

after working in a hospital and seeing older doctors hire people just to answer and reply emails.. I think this market assumption may be correct.

Hospitals and private practice healthcare offices are two entirely different worlds. In a small healthcare practice the doctor will be paying each staff member as an employee.