In 2005, Dr. J. Michael Benfield, wanted to offer quality acute and primary healthcare in a private and personal setting in the patient’s home. He wanted to provide the most convenient, detailed and service oriented medical care to meet the needs of patients by reducing the barriers many patients have in visiting a provider’s office. To do this he founded MD2U, "doctors who make house calls."

Gentiva Health Services employs approximately 30,000 home healthcare workers including nurses, therapists, and administrative staff. Home healthcare involves significant amounts of paperwork and record keeping—including clinical records, claims, and benefits-related forms and documentation—and Gentiva caregivers enter volumes of data manually. In addition to taking time and creating frustration for the caregiver, this situation prolongs the turnaround of important patient data and billing information. Gentiva believes the remedy may be in pen-based technology and the Tablet PC.

The New York State Office of Mental Health is deploying Tablet PCs running Microsoft® Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition to clinical staff responsible for managing incident reporting and investigations. Instead of recording findings on paper to rekey later, clinicians and clinical risk managers can carry the Tablet PCs right into the examination room, or use them on the ward to gather information. Mobile access to OMH’s incident management and reporting system ensures that users efficiently and accurately collect incident findings and that incident information is saved as soon as it is collected.

The 2,500 clinicians of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY) visit patients’ homes to provide nursing and other physical and mental healthcare. The organization needed a way to record and share patient information quickly, reducing the time between a patient visit and the updating of that patient’s record in the organization’s record-keeping system. Additionally, VNSNY wanted to shorten clinicians’ long days and reduce their paperwork loads. An early adopter of pen-based technology, VNSNY recently implemented a solution using 2,500 Tablet PCs that run Microsoft® Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition. Tablet PCs enable field clinicians to quickly and accurately complete their work on-site. With consistent formats for its patient records and integration between applications, VNSNY now can manipulate and analyze information to make improvements in the way in which it delivers care.