Apple's iPad Leverages Anatomy Software To Move Into Healthcare
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
3D4Medical and Apple team up to create attractive devices for the medical field.
Macworld detailed Apple’s new, larger iPad — the iPad Pro — which features a 12.9-inch viewing surface and 64-bit processor and was called by Apple CEO Tim Cook “the biggest news in iPad since the iPad.” The device will go on sale in November with a list price between $799 and $1,079, an optional $166 keyboard, and an Apple Pencil (a stylus) costing $99. Apple is marketing the new iPad toward current Microsoft Surface Pro 3 users, calling it “the most advanced and powerful iPad we’ve ever created,” according to Apple.
One particular market Apple has targeted for its new iPad is healthcare, where demand is high for something smaller than a laptop or PC but larger and more capable than a smartphone. And Apple has partnered with Irish medical technology company 3D4Medical to help tap into this market.
“It makes sense for Apple to reveal a new keyboard along with new, larger-screen iPads with faster processors,” Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., explained according to The New York Times. “The message being that Apple is trying to push the iPad to be more of a PC replacement, a converged device of a tablet notebook that has broader computing powers.”
According to Irene Walsh, 3D4’s head of design, the iPad Pro uses 3D4 apps and images to provide a high-definition 3D model of the whole body, or any specific body parts that are adaptable. The iPad Pro “raises the bar when it comes to what 3D4 Medical can do, adding depth and detail that wasn’t possible before on a mobile device,” explains a company statement.
3D4Medical CEO John Moore adds, “We believe that the Complete Anatomy Series will completely change the way doctors and patients communicate; ultimately increasing medical understanding and improving patient care from remote villages to the best hospitals in the world.”
“I can actually share this model with my patient and record a conversation,” Walsh explained, making it highly desirable as a tool in healthcare given that researchers have estimated a typical patient only remembers about 14 percent of the conversation with a doctor.
Moore says the ability to not only show a patient what’s happening to his or her body, but record that conversation into the medical record, will give the iPad Pro and 3D4Medical added weight in the healthcare market.
“There are massive changes going on within hospitals with physicians and how they consult,” Moore said in a recent profile in The Independent. “New laws will say that if you go to a consultant, he must make a medical record and store it. There are a lot of things attached to that, to educate the user. Because of that legislation and because our stuff is digitized, it’s a natural progression that the consultant uses an app and backs it up into an electronic medical record.”