Jim Klein, director of healthcare technology for Cambridge, Mass.-based technology company InterSystems, says he may have the answer to speeding up the adoption of electronic medical records by physicians.

Create systems that run on the Mac OS X platform, he suggests.Doctors, believed to be among the early adopters of computer technology, gravitated toward Macintosh computers for home use long before the average user, he theorizes, and they may be able to make the transition to computer use in the office more easily using a Mac rather than a PC.

The advantages, says Klein, are familiarity with the Mac and an operating system that is easy to use.

It's generally acknowledged in the industry that less than 10 percent of U.S. physician practices have deployed an electronic medical record system to date.

One of the barriers is the cost. Another often-mentioned obstacle is the reluctance of physicians to move from their comfort zone of paper charts.

"Everyone wants to drive the cost down," said Klein. "It has to be brain-dead simple. What you want is great performance."

InterSystems, which provides the Ensemble integration platform, recently released its CACHE database on the Mac platform.

InterSystems supports both Microsoft and Mac-based application development.

CACHE offers the features and performance that Macintosh developers need to deploy highly scalable applications across the enterprise, said Robert Nagle, InterSystems vice president of software development.

"The stability, security and ease of use of the Mac OS X are major factors behind its strength in the healthcare, science and biotech industries," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of worldwide developer relations. Okamoto said the Apple development community is working on a wide range of healthcare applications.

Nebraska-based HealthWare Corp. uses InterSystems technology to develop office management applications for dental and physician practices. HealthWare CEO Michael Edwards says "ease of use and low total cost of ownership are especially attractive in a professional office environment. Users in small-to-mid-sized physician and dental offices have been Macintosh enthusiasts for years," he said.