Apple devices to power Georgia hospital in a primary for the U.S

Apple devices will power a hospital in Georgia, a primary for the corporate because it continues its push into the health-care sector. 

Emory Healthcare on Thursday announced that its Emory Hillandale Hospital will likely be the primary U.S. hospital that runs on Apple products, including the iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, iMac and Mac mini. The devices may also integrate with software from Epic Systems, the leading electronic health record vendor within the nation.  

Hillandale is using Apple products because they’re user-friendly, require less IT support, offer cybersecurity benefits and have long-lasting hardware and battery life, Emory executives told CNBC.

Since that is latest territory for the health system, Emory said it should closely monitor the devices to make sure they improve the organization’s quality of care.  

“It may well actually be a game changer that is not been done anywhere else within the country,” Emory Healthcare CEO Dr. Joon Lee said in an interview. “And like every thing else, it is not going to be without its challenges, but it surely really opens the door to multiple possibilities.”

Emory Healthcare is a tutorial health system in Georgia that operates 10 hospitals and supports roughly 26,400 employees. Its Hillandale facility is a 100-bed community hospital on the outskirts of the greater Atlanta metro area. 

“At Apple, we consider in technology’s power to enhance lives,” Dr. Sumbul Desai, vice chairman of health at Apple, said in a press release to CNBC. “We’re thrilled that Emory Hillandale Hospital is using Apple products to deliver exceptional care — because doctors and nurses must have the very best technology on this planet to serve their patients.”

The health system’s interest in using more Apple products was partially inspired by the foremost CrowdStrike outage that rocked businesses, including Emory, last July, said Dr. Ravi Thadhani, the manager vice chairman for health affairs of Emory University.  

Thadhani said greater than 20,000 of the health system’s devices were “paralyzed” by a faulty CrowdStrike software update, but notably, all of its Apple products were still working. Within the aftermath of the outage, executives asked engineers from Apple and Epic to go to Emory and explore a deeper integration. 

“They were working on one another already, you possibly can get Epic on an Apple device, but it surely wasn’t quick and it wasn’t seamless,” Thadhani said. “And in order that they got here, they descended here.” 

Epic is Emory’s electronic health record, or EHR, provider. EHRs are digital versions of a patient’s medical history which are updated by doctors and nurses. The software is also known as the “central nervous system” of a health-care organization, said Seth Howard, Epic’s executive vice chairman of research and development.

Howard said Epic has worked with Apple for a few years, deploying apps for the iPhone way back to 2010. Last 12 months, the corporate released Epic on Mac, which made its complete suite of applications available on Apple’s computer operating system macOS. 

“The Epic on Mac project was really an extension and natural next step for us on this journey with Apple,” Howard said in an interview.

Emory was an early adopter. 

Before Emory decided to roll out Apple devices throughout a complete hospital, it conducted a smaller pilot across one floor of a facility. Thadhani said the feedback from doctors and nurses was “phenomenal,” which gave the health system confidence to expand the scope.

If the launch at Hillandale is a hit, Lee said the health system could deploy Apple products across other Emory facilities in the longer term. 

“Definitely our intent and hope is that it should show a difference, and that we are able to expand and it should even be a model for other health systems across the country,” he said.