News Analysis

Technology tablet

Acer is pitching its tablet PCs to medics in the Indian healthcare segment. Abhinav Singh finds that this initiative is paying off .

Acer’s TravelMate tablet PCs were initially marketed at the head honchos of the corporate world. Now the company is targeting doctors and specialists for whom a tablet PC can be a powerful tool.

Says S Rajendran, General Manager, Sales & Marketing, Consumer Product Group, Acer India, “In some countries doctors adopting tablet PCs have found that their productivity goes up considerably as the number of patients handled increases, there is an improvement in turnaround time, and discussions with colleagues on cases is made easier.” The quality of interaction with a patient (while explaining the intricacies of a complex ailment or surgery) has gone up, and being able to update case histories online from a patient’s bedside or to access the patient’s medical history wirelessly from a centralised server is an asset.

Representatives of Acer are hopeful that the tablet PC will be an instant hit in the healthcare vertical. Explains Rajendran, “Currently in India, the ratio of physicians to the population is quite low at around 0.5 to 0.6 doctors per 1,000. In developed economies this can be 6 to 8 times higher. One way to deal with this low ratio is to improve the productivity of physicians. Healthcare specialists are widely- travelled, well-informed and highly-networked.” Acer is marketing its recently-launched TravelMate C202 Tablet PCs to this category of professionals.

At present the company sells about 100 tablet PCs a month. “We are hopeful of ramping up sales by at least another 50 percent in the next few quarters,” says Rajendran. Acer is also launching an initiative called DEAN (Doctor’s Empowerment with Acer Notebooks) for Indian doctors. Under this scheme, a doctor is offered an instant rebate of Rs 4,000 at the point of purchase for a TravelMate C202. Beyond this, during the first quarter of 2006, Acer along with Intel will identify a set of 50 leading healthcare institutions to drive programmes to enable higher IT adoption.

User experience

Dr Mohan Badgandi, Head of the Diabetes and Endocrinology Department at Manipal Hospital in Bangalore is a dedicated user of the TravelMate C110 and C310 tablet PCs. He uses them to copy case notes and queries of patients, and it has become easy for him to show patients their case sheets. Comments Badgandi, “Earlier, it took a long time for me to duplicate all my interactions with the patient on a desktop PC [he took his notes on paper and later transferred them to the PC]. Using a stylus I can now directly write on a tablet PC. Earlier I could see 15 patients a day on an average. Now the number is 60.” Badgandi believes that the tablet PC will be a valuable tool for the healthcare vertical by helping providers automate many paper-based processes and streamline the practice of medicine.

The tablet PC has also resulted in better management of patient records. It makes it easier for a doctor to send queries to other hospitals and conduct clinical research in co-ordination with specialists. Tablet PCs in conjunction with a hospital LAN or WLAN can greatly boost productivity. Adds Badgandi: “I can handle 6 to 7 clinical trials at a time compared to the 2 to 3 trials I could undertake earlier.” Sketches of any ailment are also captured with ease with the tablet PC, and the doctor has been able to increase the awareness level of the patient regarding the intricacies of his case.

Badgandi is now looking forward to more. “I may contemplate using the C202 model in the near future as it has biometric fingerprinting security. There are 4 to 5 of us conducting research... the biometric security feature will prevent unauthorised individuals from operating the tablet PC, thus making it secure.”

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com