Skip to Main Content

INTRODUCTION

Key Points

  • Clinicians are busier than ever before and time dedicated to information retrieval and documentations competes with the demands for direct patient care.

  • Personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other portable computing devices with wireless capabilities are increasingly useful in medical care.

  • PDAs can be used both as standalone devices or extensions of hospital networks.

  • PDAs can facilitate the use of standardized best practices.

  • Early data suggest that PDAs allow practitioners to be more efficient.

Clinicians are working harder: seeing more patients with less time and lower reimbursement. Tools that increase efficiency without affecting patient care are one answer to the need for greater efficiency, much as automated assembly lines helped to increase the efficiency of American industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Handheld computers of various sorts are increasingly popular both as standalone assistants and as wireless terminals carried by clinicians as part of a hospital information system. The latter obviously have substantially greater functionality to the degree that they allow information to flow from the clinician to the network and vice versa (Fig. 17-1).

Figure 17-1

PDAs can function in either a standalone or networked configuration in a medical setting.

Palm and Windows have differing operating systems for palm-sized devices (Fig. 17-2) and a number of software vendors have manufactured medical software designed to facilitate the jobs of clinicians as they practice. While the prototypical devices had black and white screens, newer models feature color screens, wireless capabilities, photography, and voice recording and playing. Small devices like these can be carried in a pocket, while larger computers such as a tablet PC are more analogous to a clipboard, albeit one with substantially enhanced abilities.

Figure 17-2

PDA operating systems.

According to a recent study by Forrester’s Consumer Technographics, clinicians are generally more technologically oriented than other consumers: online more often, more likely to own PDAs, have personal computers at home, have broadband connections at home and work, and use computers in the process of doing their job.

Many medical schools now mandate and subsidize the purchase of handheld devices, which have replaced the pocketful of quick reference guides carried by medical students and house officers in previous eras (Fig. 17-3). Programs such as patient trackers, drug databases, and medical references are ubiquitous both as free downloads and commercial products.

Figure 17-3

Many medical schools require the use of PDAs as part of the curriculum.

The PDA is well suited to medical applications because it is an electronic tool that acts at the point of care. There are several key drivers favoring the use of PDAs in clinical practice, including ...

Pop-up div Successfully Displayed

This div only appears when the trigger link is hovered over. Otherwise it is hidden from view.

  • Create a Free Profile