Microsoft is touting the Surface Pro 3 as a “clinical grade” device, designed to be used in the healthcare industry. On top of that, the Seattle Children’s Hospital and UPMC have selected the Surface Pro 3 to help their organizations.
“Like its predecessor, Surface Pro 3 was designed to be a Clinical Grade device – designed from the ground up to ensure maximum performance and usability for healthcare workers. From powerful Intel Core processors to enterprise level data security to the ability be sanitized between patient encounters, clinical grade devices promise the performance, reliability, and security that are required to help caregivers be as productive as they can be while ensuring the highest quality of patient care,” Microsoft statred in an official blog post.
So what exactly is clinical grade? Clinical grade promises the performance, reliability, and security needed to maximize caregiver productivity and ensure the highest quality of patient care.
Ranked as one of the best children’s hospitals in the US, the Seattle Children’s Hospital has selected the Surface Pro 3 to replace their existing laptop devices. The clinicians at this hospital will utilize the Surface Pro 3 for electronic medical record (EMR) management while also allowing adherence to HIPAA and other strict security regulations in healthcare. “Surface Pro 3 is going to be our laptop replacement,” said Wes Wright, CIO of Seattle Children’s Hospital. “We look at weight. We look at battery life. Application compatibility. It was kind of a no-brainer for us.”
That’s not the only healthcare organization that will make the move to the Surface Pro 3. UPMC, a leading integrated healthcare delivery and financing system in Pittsburgh, will be deplying 2,000 Surface Pro 3 devices for use in their innovative Convergence application to give their physicians quick access to the most important information they need about every patient they see.
“We originally spent about a year trying to develop the application on the iPad. What we found was that it was not going to work in the enterprise setting. We weren’t able to achieve a lot of the functionality– such as interfacing with the legacy systems– that we could achieve with the Surface on Windows 8,” said Rebecca Kaul, Chief Innovation Officer for UPMC and the President of UPMC’s Technology Development Center.
“The doctors who tried it loved the visualizations our developers came up with, but they balked when told the iPad app would be read-only and that they would still have to go back to their EHR to record data. They’d either have to go to their desktop or, at best, open up a Citrix session from the iPad, log in, and navigate to the right section of the EHR to log the data. We’ve looked at other devices in the Windows 8 realm, but landed back on the Surface because it really has the right balance of features in terms of size, form factor, and ability to disinfect.”
In this day and age, it is all about delivering more results with less resources, especially in healthcare. Microsoft touts the ability to spend more time with patients and not technology, which is achievable with the Surface Pro 3.
