Apple's secret plan to steal doctors' hearts

If you talk to technical staffers at any large hospital that is using — or even thinking of using — iPads today, Afshad Mistri's name is pretty likely to come up. Earlier in November, he organized a cross-Canada series of invitation-only conferences for medical professionals in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto who are looking at using the iPad at work. He's also the guy who in September launched a special iTunes room for healthcare, and promoted it to a select group of healthcare app developers. Apple has to carefully watch what it says when it talks about the iPad in medicine, says Bradley Thompson, a partner with the law firm Epstein Becker Green and an expert on FDA regulations. As long as they promote it as a general-use computing device, Apple should be fine. But "if they were promoting it for specific medical device uses," he says, "they would cross a line."