By Curtis Woods, COO of Integrated Solutions, a division
of IT4thePlanet
While many of us are "wowed" by the cool factor
and ease of use of Apple Products (the iPad, iPhone and MacBook's just to name a
few), if you are in a clinical environment utilizing electronic Practice
Management and/or Electronic Health Records applications - beware. Unless your
EHR application has documented, built-in support for Mac products you may be
disappointed with the cost of implementing these devices within the clinic.
Even if your EHR vendor fully supports Apple products,
the clinic must have wireless technology in place to connect to the EHR
application, whether it is located within your clinic or in the cloud. The
wireless devices must be robust, deliver a strong signal to the device and
ensure that the signal remains stable at all times. If any of these criteria
are not in place, the user will experience dropped connections to the
application, slow access to the application or both. It can get very
frustrating quickly. The cost of the higher end wireless devices (named access
points) that meet this criteria can be upwards of $900 each and in many
instances more than one device will be required.
The cost of remote access applications also has to be
considered. If your EHR provider does not inherently support an iPad or
MacBook, remote access must be in place so that the device can connect to a
system that is supported. The most widely used are Microsoft remote desktop
services and Citrix. These applications provide a "virtual" desktop
from the Apple device to a system where the EHR application is installed. The
user connects to it from their device and then accesses the EHR application.
The cost and impact of remote access within a clinic can be enormous and the
requirements must be carefully researched in order to determine the complexity
needed.
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