Content area
Full Text
'Simple' hand-held applications are adding functions to meet market demand.
For clinicians and PDA-based "plug and play" applications, it was love at first sight.
The initial spread of PDAs across the clinician landscape was spurred in large part by the availability of software that could be bought on Monday and used on Tuesday. Applications such as medical reference content, drug calculators and medical testing handbooks were an instant hit with doctors and nurses who were tired of lugging around huge textbooks or having to constantly grab reference material off a shelf.
PDAs and clinical software have come a long way since then. Many organizations are providing mobile access to their major clinical information systems, as well as installing very sophisticated, interactive software on PDAs.
Despite these advances in wireless connectivity and PDA functionality, clinicians continue to covet plug-and-play applications and continue to push for more functionality. PDA software vendors and publishers have responded by developing specialized clinical reference software and more frequent updates to their applications.
Small software developers also have jumped into the fray and are creating more interactive medical calculators, medical terminology translation guides and coding guides. And recently, large reference software vendors have started to enhance their software, offering more robust searching and cross-referencing features.
As a result, the market for plugand-play PDA software continues to grow because clinicians already have had much success with it, says David Brooks, principal at BCC Consulting, a Durham, N.C.-based health care I.T. consulting firm.
"Hand-held systems can offer more frequent updates than paper reference guides, and they're also inexpensive and easy to implement because they don't require integration with other clinical systems," he says. "Now there's more of them and vendors are offering more robust search capabilities in their applications."
At work, at school
Allyson Mobley, R.N., often crossreferences among various PDA-based clinical...