Shopping for a Mobile Clinical Assistant (MCA)

You're not going to find a Mobile Clinical Assistant (MCA) at Best Buy or Staples, so how do you go shopping for one of these? If you'd like to integrate the use of an MCA into your outpatient practice (even though most are primarily designed for the inpatient setting or emergency room), then you may wish to speak with your hospital IT department to see what types of MCAs they're currently using.

Maybe they use the Motion Computing C5. At roughly $2,500 - $3,500, this is not a cheap device. You could also get the MediSlate i1040XT for roughly $2,800. You could shop for the Panasonic Toughbook H1 and pay around $3,500 for this MCA. Amazon even sells this one.

If it were up to me, I'd struggle between the Motion Computing C5 and the Panasonic Toughbook H1. The current prices are still too high, but my hope is that in 2010 we'll start to see the prices fall on these MCAs. Wouldn't it be wild if Apple got into the MCA space and developed some type of slate tablet for the hospital setting?