There's a long history of tablet form-factors being used in healthcare, and the docs I know who use them swear by them. The article mentions the Motion C5, whic

There's a long history of tablet form-factors being used in healthcare, and the docs I know who use them swear by them. The article mentions the Motion C5, which is pretty cool from a hardware standpoint, and is pretty decent to use, from what I've heard... also, the Marshfield Clinic network in Wisconsin has been using tablet PCs with modified EHR software as their standard clinical workstation for years, and has put together a pretty amazing system built around tablet computing. The tablet-and-touch-screen form factor has some interesting healthcare properties- the most important, IMHO, that a well-designed touch screen UI can be used easily by people in a hurry who are wearing gloves. From what I've seen, most tablet PCs just use modified versions of Windows, which means lots of small and fiddly UI elements, and therefore falls short of meeting this potential UI sweet-spot. If Apple can get an iPhone-style UI with nice big buttons, task-oriented interaction (as opposed to document-oriented or window-oriented), etc. working on a gadget that can be easily sterilized/autoclaved and that has a screen big enough to display significant amounts of data, they might have something that would work really well in a medical context. The problem, as always, is that people (especially docs and hospital IT admins) are really resistant to change, and EHR vendors resist true interoperability with the passion of a thousand burning suns. But, hey, the iPhone's remarkable success has demonstrated that building a gadget that doctors & nurses actually want to use is a good way to force management to support it (at least, it has at my hospital), so there is precedent for Apple-driven bottom-up change in healthcare IT (now that's a sentence that I would never have imagined writing four or five years ago...).