UPMC Taps Surface Pro 3 for their ingenious Convergence healthcare app

University of Pittsburth Medical Center (UPMC), a leading integrated healthcare delivery and financing system in Pittsburgh, is utilizing technology to improve patient care and allow its physicians to devote more time to patient interaction. UPMC has chosen to deploy 2000 Surface Pro 3 devices for use with their innovative Convergence application to give their physicians quick access to the most important information they need about every patient they see. "We originally spent about a year trying to develop the application on the iPad. What we found was that it was not going to work in the enterprise setting. We weren't able to achieve a lot of the functionality-- such as interfacing with the legacy systems-- that we could achieve with the Surface on Windows 8," said Rebecca Kaul, Chief Innovation Officer for UPMC and the President of UPMC's Technology Development Center. "The doctors who tried it loved the visualizations our developers came up with, but they balked when told the iPad app would be read-only and that they would still have to go back to their EHR to record data. They'd either have to go to their desktop or, at best, open up a Citrix session from the iPad, log in, and navigate to the right section of the EHR to log the data. We've looked at other devices in the Windows 8 realm, but landed back on the Surface because it really has the right balance of features in terms of size, form factor, and ability to disinfect."