Let Your Fingers Do the Walking
My wife and I were in Boston last weekend for dinner. We came across a traffic and pedestrian accident that closed a street. An EMT was busy on his PDA. We paused to watch and when he was done and off the accident site I asked him about it. He was using the PDA to check for adverse drug reactions for the treatment of the accident victim and filling out a report to give to the hospital.
The EMT said PDAs are a necessity because you can't carry books or have the Web on hand, and they need to be prepared for patients ranging from children to the elderly. This got me thinking about mobile technology and healthcare.
Just like the rapid proliferation of Blackberries in the corporate world, the growth in mobile technology in healthcare has been similarly swift. According to Gartner, an industry research firm, two in four doctors are using PDAs with medical applications.
Mobile medical technologies, integrated with a hospital's EMR, provide flexible solutions for doctors and nurses at any point of care while cutting down medical errors and administrative work. E-prescribing, charge capture, medical reference content, decision support, imaging, medical records: mobile technology from companies like PatientKeeper, ePocrates, MercuryMD and GE Healthcare are changing healthcare.
Here in Massachusetts, CareGroup's Beth Israel and Deaconess Hospitals give their doctors PDAs to ensure that adequate reference works are available anytime and anywhere. I asked my own doctor about it and he said his PDA has important medical references like Physicians' Desk Reference, Griffith's 5-Minute Clinical Consult, and A to Z Drug Facts. Beats carrying around heavy books. I'd imagine that doctors abroad, be they in Iraq or remote provinces of avian flu-prone China, find such mobile solutions useful.
Tags: EMR, Healthcare+PR, Medical+PR, Mobile+Healthcare, Online+PR, Wireless+Healthcare
Posted by Shawn Whalen on May 30, 2006 at 4:45 PM
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Comments
Your instincts are correct. However, in countries such as China, PDA usage is limited by purchasing power and language. The cost of a smart phone or PDA would be at least a week's salary for a government physician. And there are few if any PDA medical programs (certainly not the ones you have listed) available in the local language. However, if you are a physician or healthcare worker being posted by a corporation or major NGO, PDA and smart phone-based medical programs would be invaluable.
Posted by: David Sampson | October 2, 2006 10:10 AM