+ re-examing and sometimes redesigning business processes to better exploit mobile devices and apps.

Custom built mobile apps for the iPad were the main focus at the outset for The Ottawa Hospital (TOH), in Ottawa, Ontario. Shortly after the iPad was launched, the hospital decided to buy more than 3,000 of them to deploy a mission-critical, electronic physician order entry system, which lets doctors order diagnostic imaging, lab tests and medications. The first two rolled out in late 2001 with the help of a contract software development company. One condition of the contract: Hospital CIO Dale Potter's insistence that the company have a full-time UI ergonomics expert assigned to the project.

The third app, for medications, neatly shows how mobility is disrupting conventional software development. The hospital uses on an open architecture clinical information system, Oacis, now part of . The vendor planned to introduce mobile device access to the repository in 2014, at least a year later than the hospital needed it. Instead of waiting, TOH forged an unprecedented deal. Telus agreed to classify the hospital as a research-and-development site for the software, allowing the hospital's coders to access the full source code for native modifications.

"We have to build the thing ourselves," Potter says. "This is a big challenge for hospitals. [Healthcare software] vendors are trying to catch up and address the topic of mobility."

The first wave of rudimentary mobile apps is already proving too limited for companies.