Hospital Purchases Hundreds Of Ipads To Protect Doctors From Getting Infected With COVID-19

Amid the COVID-19 outbreak, many people are using Zoom to hold online conferences, doctors at Stanford Health Care are using this application to communicate with patients, getting rid of direct contact.

Each patient room in the hospital emergency department has recently been equipped with an iPad on a small mobile wheelie stand. This setup can be used to connect COVID-19 patients with healthcare workers.

Dr. Ryan Ribeira who is leading the project said in an interview that using the iPad for communication allowed healthcare staff to regularly check the patients’ conditions without having to use protective equipment like PPE or masks.

Doctors and nurses in the US have been facing a shortage of protective equipment such as masks even when they have been working on the front lines in the fight again the virus. Stanford Health Care started discussing the possibility of using the iPad around mid-March and the program has been running since the end of the month.

Devices are set up to automatically answer calls from doctors, which will solve problems for patients who are too tired to answer calls. Dr. Ribeira also added that an unexpected benefit he saw from the use of iPads was that the patients seemed more comfortable when they could clearly see the faces of the medical staff.

A nurse said that the patients were always worried when seeing healthcare workers in their protective equipment. They couldn’t see the staff’s facial expressions. By using iPads, the staff doesn’t have to put on a mask, making communication easier.

The success of the program so far has influenced the way the hospital sees the role of technology in the healthcare sector. Doctors believe that this will undoubtedly change the way healthcare works after the pandemic.

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