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Tablet PCs are more popular than ever. They're mobile, powerful and proven to help clinicians enhance productivity and efficiency. However, with more tablet PCs available than ever before, how do you choose the right tablet PC for your workflow?

The U.S. healthcare industry is undergoing a game-changing transformation in the way it delivers care. The “meaningful use” requirements under the HITECH Act, the new payment and delivery reform model under the PPACA and the consumer movement are all converging to help create a system that improves the quality of care and clinical outcomes, drives workflow efficiencies, and reduces and manages cost. Forward-thinking healthcare providers, payers and suppliers are taking up the challenge and looking to health IT to enable the new delivery system. Healthcare stakeholders are embracing mobility technology as a viable solution.

With emerging capabilities far beyond phone calls, email, and even access to medical apps, smartphones have kicked off a communications revolution. Given this changing environment, we assembled a roundtable of industry and technology experts to compile this list of what 2012 will mean for smartphone use in hospitals.

For physicians, the point-of-care has shifted from a clinical setting to anywhere the physician accesses data. Yet some hospitals are slower to embrace the technology citing cost and security concerns when integrated with patient electronic health records (EHRs). This is changing.

Medical applications are among the most demanding users of network capacity, real-time performance, mission-critical reliability, and data security. Hospitals and medical centers are accelerating the pace of accessing and storing patient records via EMRs. Considering that data centers storing these records are often not connected to the main hospital, or medical office building, all this adds up to an explosion of information straining existing network infrastructure.

Virtualization, cloud computing, and wireless technology are fundamentally changing enterprise computing, providing revolutionary gains in productivity and cost savings. Powerful enterprise applications can now be delivered to almost any device, anywhere, at any time.

According to the CDC and NIH, over 50 percent of the factors related to personal health can be traced to lifestyle choices, while only 10 percent is related to the medical care system. This finding illustrates a stark truth: the US healthcare system in its current incarnation, a system of facility based, episodic care, is insufficient to the task of improving population health.