1. the iPod touch is already a far better tablet than any iteration of, say, Windows tablets.  If the iTablet shares the iPod's ease of use, reliability, durability, battery life and toolchain, there's no reason to expect those old lessons apply.<p>2. agreed. but they promise to be far more effective and far less costly than putting PCs all over a hospital.<p>3. they didn't care for computers, email or smart phones either.<p>4. Any effective device is either going to be nurse- or bed-/room-centric. Frankly, even great interfaces aren't so fast that it's worth the time for most doctors to navigate the UI to bring up a patient's file himself.  Nurses move, but doctors move more, their waste is more expensive and their frustration/errors more dangerous.<p>5. battery and connectivity issues are less a problem in nurse-centric scenarios and a non-issue for place-centric.<p>6. think of it as a replacement for the ever-present clipboards and physical files.  Instead of handing off a file, the nurse hands over her tablet.  The legal aspects will have to be updated for a digital solution of one type or another. That ship is set to sail with or without tablets.<p>Also: checklists and best practice management would be far easier to capture, manage and report on, if it was being digitally captured.  Paper works fine for the physician because she can fudge it after the fact.  Were it captured at time of service and the lists themselves generated dynamically based on the particular case at hand, more errors would be caught, sooner.<p>(I've worked on several smaller projects in the healthcare industry and spent more than my share of time in hospitals, ERs and doctor's offices.)