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February 27, 2004

 
PDA Benefits Realized Quickly

Gibbsboro, N.J.-based Virtua Health didn't have to wait long to get results from its recent PDA pilot study. After only a month, a control group of 20 physicians saw enough benefits to using PDAs to access clinical information that the delivery system decided to offer the technology to all of its physicians beginning in March, said Vice President and CIO Linda Reed.

"Our physicians always say when we 'do something' to them, it slows them down," she said in an interview with Mobile Health Data and Health Data Management Feb. 25 at the 2004 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference & Exhibition. "So we wanted to give them a technology they could perceive as 'for' them, not 'to' them."

For the study, Virtua Health used software from Durham, N.C.-based MercuryMD Inc. to enable PDA access to clinical data such as patient lists, lab results, orders, radiology results, medication lists and demographics. It required physicians in the study to purchase their own PDAs.

Within a month, physicians were saving about 30 minutes a day using the PDAs to access the clinical data at the point of care, Reed said. Physicians currently are synching their PDAs to gather the data. Virtua Health will enable real-time access to the data from PDAs later this year after it completes implementation of an enterprisewide wireless local area network.

Source: Mobile Health Data
posted by Kent 11:25 PM | |

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