New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s (NYP) bedside tablet project replaces traditional nurse call buzzers with tablets that patients can also use to access personal health data. The hospital has operated a MyNYP.org website based on Microsoft HealthVault since 2009, but it’s been a personal health records portal for patients to use from home.

Now the portal is also an in-patient bedside communications tool. Patients are often barraged by information, and the tablets let them browse information about their condition through the portal. The Windows 8 tablets, combined with two custom built Windows 8 apps, enable patients to seamlessly communicate with their care-team and quickly access their health information. When patients use the tablets to call for help, they can be more specific, helping nurses cut down on the clamor associated with the old system.

Often, hospitalized patients can be overwhelmed by the volume of information doctors and nurses share with them, but concepts like the NYP tablets hold that information for review at any time and allow patients to track their condition over time by following trends in their vital signs and other measures

More hospitals are slowly introducing similar concepts as they receive almost entirely positive feedback from patients. The vital question to answer will be the cost effectiveness of such tablets and how much hospitals would need to spend in order to introduce such systems. In the pilot test, NYP deployed tablets to two surgical nursing units with 69 beds, providing each bed with a tablet. It has proven cost-effective, taking advantage of existing network infrastructure. NYP says it’s spending $500,000 on software development, whereas it estimated the cost of additional lines to the nurse call system at $40 million.

It is not for nothing that, when Steve Jobs was once asked in what sector he sees the next big revolution his answer was the combination of Health Care and Technology.The goal is to do for medical devices what Steve Jobs did for phones. NYP has taken a step in the right direction.