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For Business
June 12, 2014

Healthcare Industry Welcomes Surface Pro 3, UPMC Among Early Adopters

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When we looked to develop the Surface Pro 3, we gathered feedback from commercial customers in many walks of life. They wanted an awesome laptop that was thin and light, had great battery life, good performance, and a brilliant screen. “Oh, and we want to replace the need to carry an iPad too,” is how most of them capped off their feedback. Healthcare customers were no different. Enter Surface Pro 3.

Surface Pro 3

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 CoreTM 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.  Before deploying tablets in your organization, it’s important to make sure the devices you’re considering are clinical grade.

At this year’s HIMSS Annual Conference, we shared how healthcare customers are utilizing Surface devices to transform their businesses. Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society (NMCRS) has implemented a Windows 8 app on Surface dedicated to helping its visiting nurses provide better home health patient care experiences to new mothers associated with the Navy Marine Corps. Aegis Living, a national leader in senior assisted living and memory care facilities, has equipped their staff with Surface tablets to help them with resident care and medication administration—achieving savings of over 11,000 hours per year. Community Health Accreditation Program (CHAP), the nation’s oldest community-based accrediting body, utilizes Surface Pro devices with its site visitors to observe, interview and document information seamlessly while conducting their visits.

We’ve recently announced that BMW, Coca Cola, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, and Avanade have all adopted Surface Pro 3, even before it is available in market. We also revealed how Seattle Children’s Hospital has selected Surface Pro 3 to replace their existing laptop devices. Consistently ranked as one of the best children’s hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report, Seattle Children’s Hospital serves as the pediatric and adolescent academic medical referral center for the largest landmass of any children’s hospital in the country. As a replacement strategy for their existing laptops, Surface Pro 3 provides their clinicians with a modern, touch-enabled user interface 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”.

Surface Pro 3

Today, we’re happy to announce another early adopter healthcare customer, who has quickly identified how Surface Pro 3 can help their organization.

UPMC, a leading integrated healthcare delivery and financing system in Pittsburgh, is utilizing technology to improve patient care and allow its physicians to devote more time to patient interaction. UPMC has chosen to deploy 2000 Surface Pro 3 devices for use with 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.“

As our customers deploy Surface Pro 3 to more and more hospitals, doctors and nurses, we wanted to reiterate some of the new characteristics and how they deliver improved performance for healthcare organizations:

  • The new, larger 12.1” display delivers more screen real estate for clinicians to access the data-intensive interfaces found in many full electronic medical records (EMR) software packages—versus forcing them to use stripped-down “apps”.
  • The improved multi-position Kickstand provides the perfect angle for pen input, without interfering with patient interaction.
  • The lighter and thinner Surface Pro 3 allows for greater mobility for clinicians as they make their rounds in the facility or travel between locations—and eliminate valuable time otherwise spent logging in and out of several stationary devices throughout the day.
  • The new Surface Pro 3 Pen facilitates enhanced clinical note taking, while improving the experience accessing busy EMR application interfaces on a mobile device.
  • Surface Pro 3’s increased battery life means that healthcare providers never have to leave their patients to tend to their device.
  • The new range of Intel CoreTM processor options on Surface Pro 3 are designed to support all types of healthcare workers—from the limited needs of part-time caregivers to the most graphically-intensive PACS users.

We’re continually hearing from doctors how Surface provides them advantages they haven’t been able to achieve with other mobile devices:

  • “One of the really attractive features to me was the pen option. When we have very quickly evolving situations with patients, jotting down notes is still the way that most clinicians go,” said Dr. Maida Chen, Medical Director for Sleep Disorders at Seattle Children’s Hospital. “The multi-position kickstand really offers a lot of possibilities and opens up communications…I can maintain great eye contact and hence a much better rapport with the families”
  • “What’s really interesting is that we’re now able to sit at our clinical desktops and visualize the information on the Windows 8 framework. When we’re rounding, we’re able to undock our Surface devices and carry them around as tablets and really have all the information present to us at the touch of our fingertips. Our Convergence platform on the Surface device brings the patients’ stories to life, and enables superb user experience interoperability and optimal workflow between the tablet and the electronic medical records.” Dr. Rasu Shrestha, VP—Medical Information Technology and Radiologist, UPMC.
  • “Technology has changed the way I practice medicine. With the power and mobility of Surface, we’re making a huge difference.  We’re saving lives.  Surface is a game changer.” Dr. Nick Patel, Medical Director – Palmetto Health.
  • “Surface functions exactly like my workstation does.  And the really wonderful thing was that I could actually take the Surface into the patient’s room, and I found myself sitting down and talking to the patient face to face, eye to eye. And I can probably see patients in half the time because of not having the inefficiencies of going back to a workstation.  This makes medicine fun!  This makes Epic fun!”   Dr. Edward Zabrek, MD, FACOG high risk obstetrics.
  • “I can simply grab a Microsoft Surface…and while we’re walking to the patient’s room, we can consume the data and create a care plan.  Not only outside the patient’s room, but then take the device into the patient’s room, flip the screen to show the patient, engage them in the process, and show them why we are doing the things we were doing. In that sense, it is kind of a game changer for me.” Dr. Shidev K. Rao, Cardiologist – UPMC Presbyterian Hospital

When it comes to healthcare, these days it’s all about delivering more results with less resources—without compromising on patient care. Spending more time with patients—not technology. World-class healthcare organizations such as UPMC and Seattle Children’s Hospital are achieving this with Surface Pro 3.

For more details about Surface in business, visit surface.com/business.

Thanks,

Cyril Belikoff
Senior Director – Microsoft Surface