What's New

May 31, 2004

 
Getting Generosity to Pay Off

Nearly thee years ago, Ohio State University Medical Center started handing out PDAs for free to third- and fourth-year medical students and residents. To date, the medical center has distributed about 2,600 devices that clinicians are allowed to keep even if they move on to other provider organizations.

But distributing a large number of PDAs doesn't necessarily equal a successful initiative. Only 10% to 20% of students and residents use their PDAs to download patient data before starting rounds, estimates Andrew Thomas, M.D., medical director. Three-quarters of students and half the residents use the mobile hardware primarily to access drug information and curriculum materials.

Truth be told, most students and residents did not embrace the use of PDAs when the program started, and many still don't, Thomas says. In hindsight, moving too fast may have slowed acceptance, he adds.

Click here to read the entire article on Mobile Health Data.
posted by Kent 8:31 AM | |

May 26, 2004

 
CDC Preventing Chronic Disease: New ARTbeat™ Channel

Skyscape has just released another free ARTbeat channel to give you greater access to late breaking news! CDC Preventing Chronic Disease: Public Health Research, Practice, and Policy, is a peer-reviewed electronic journal established to provide a forum for public health researchers and practitioners to share study results and practical experience. The journal is published by the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. The new offering adds to the existing channels: CDC Spotlights, MedWatch, DrugLink and Drug News Weekly.

To download your free version of CDC Preventing Chronic Disease, click here. If you already have ARTbeat, all you need to do is sync your PDA and it will be automatically added as a new channel (unless, of course, you sync to a Macintosh...ARTbeat isn't supported on the Mac).
posted by Kent 6:31 PM | |

 
AMIA Members Get Free Software

Members of the American Medical Informatics Association will receive free PDA-based medical reference software from Micromedex. Under terms of a recent agreement, Micromedex will offer AMIA members access to drug, alternative medicine, toxicology and acute care information at the point of care.

MobileMicromedex is included and features a tool to help physicians check a patient's profile of up to 32 medications for interactions. Physicians also can use the software to access information beyond basic alerts, such as the severity, onset, documentation, adverse effects, clinical management and probability of an interaction.

Source: Mobile Health Data
posted by Kent 5:29 PM | |

May 23, 2004

 
Trackback Added

I just enabled Trackback functionality using Haloscan, which also provides the commenting here. This will make it easier for other Web site users to "point" to posts on the Ectopic Brain, and vice versa. Click here for a detailed explanation of Trackback.
posted by Kent 1:37 PM | |

May 19, 2004

 
Unbound Medicine Nominated for Handango Champion Award

Handango, the leading provider of mobile downloads, recently announced the finalists for the annual Handango Champion Awards. The Handango Champion Awards recognize outstanding mobile software applications and developers.

Unbound Medicine, a leading provider of handheld, wireless, and Web solutions for healthcare, received four nominations for Best Medical Application 2004. Nominated applications in the Palm OS category were 5-Minute Clinical Consult 2004 and Harrison's Manual of Medicine, 15/e.


posted by Kent 5:13 PM | |

 
E-Rx Vendor Ramps Up PDA Buys

HealthRamp Inc. has purchased more than 200 Tungsten C PDAs from palmOne Inc. HealthRamp, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ramp Corp., will offer the Wi-Fi enabled PDAs to physicians for use with its CarePoint electronic prescribing software.

The application is designed to enable physicians to write prescriptions as well as view lab orders and results on PDAs running the Palm OS or Windows Mobile operating system. HealthRamp plans to purchase more PDAs and Treo 600 smart phones from palmOne to package with the software as it continues its electronic prescribing campaign aimed at more than 35,000 physicians nationwide.

The vendors will jointly sponsor a Webinar on June 9 focused on emerging technologies for point-of-care automation. The Webinar also will feature a demonstration of the CarePoint software on a palmOne PDA.

For more information on the Webinar, go to www.kohati.com/palmone/eprescribing.

Source: Mobile Health Data
posted by Kent 12:59 PM | |

 
HealthRamp e-Rx App Gets the Message

Clinicians using CarePoint electronic prescription software from HealthRamp Corp. soon will be able to send prescription information directly to pharmacies via their PDAs. They will be able to do so using their PDAs to access the SureScripts Messenger Services from SureScripts. The technology integration initiative is the result of an agreement announced today between HealthRamp, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ramp Corp., and SureScripts.

The CarePoint software is designed to enable physicians to write prescriptions, as well as access lab orders and results via PDAs running the Palm OS or Windows Mobile operating systems. SureScripts Messenger Services is a network designed to help clinicians electronically transmit refill authorizations, clarifications, new prescriptions and other prescribing transactions to pharmacies across the United States.

The network was founded by the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and the National Community Pharmacists Association to establish two-way electronic communication between physicians and pharmacists. More than 50% of retail pharmacies participate in the network.

Source: Mobile Health Data
posted by Kent 12:56 PM | |

May 16, 2004

 
New Ectopic Brain XML Feed

Due to reliability issues, I've changed the XML (a.k.a. RSS) feed for the Ectopic Brain to Atom format. If you're using an RSS newsreader, you'll need to change the link to: http://pbrain.hypermart.net/atom.xml. You can also see it by clicking the orange "XML" button in the upper right-hand corner of this page.
posted by Kent 6:31 PM | |

May 14, 2004

 
BMJ eHealth Issue

The British Medical Journal has dedicated an entire issue to electronic communications and healthcare, and the folks at Handhelds for Doctors have created a PDA version. You'll need to download RepliGo in order to read it. Among other things, the issue features Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli's paper on handheld computing that appeared in the BMJ earlier this year.
posted by Kent 9:01 AM | |

May 13, 2004

 
New Site: MedPDA.net

Dr. Leo Faoro just e-mailed me about his new site, MedPDA.net. The site features original articles of interest to Palm OS and Pocket PC users, along with an online discussion forum. Check it out!
posted by Kent 8:52 PM | |

May 11, 2004

 
EMRA Antibiotic Guide

The Emergency Medicine Residents' Association (EMRA) Antibiotic Guide is an invaluable application for emergency physicians or any physician, resident, medical student, and other health care professional who rotates in the ED. This guide to antibiotic selection is based on diagnosis and lists alternative antibiotic regimens with doses, costs, course, organism, etc. Virtually every type of infectious disease is covered for outpatient management and for patients needing admission. Everything you love about the printed guide is included plus the ability to search using the "Find" feature! It's fast, easy to use and accurate! Updated annually.

Thanks to Dr. Daniel Bothma for the link.


posted by Kent 8:01 AM | |

May 7, 2004

 
2004 Sanford Guide Available

The latest Sanford Guide is now available. New for 2004: auto-update feature (not supported on Macs); more streamlined installation and registration process.
posted by Kent 9:31 PM | |

 
"So...tell me about your motherboard..."

A new survey released this week at the American Psychiatric Association’s 157th Annual Meeting demonstrates psychiatrists' increasing reliance on their handheld computers and the impact these device have on their daily activities. The survey of more than 280 psychiatrists was conducted by Skyscape, a provider of mobile medical and nursing references.

Respondents to the survey stated that PDA use provides significant benefits by enabling them to spend more time with patients, while still treating more each day, and by improving the overall quality of patient care.

More than 64 percent of those surveyed use their PDA more than four times a day, with 12 percent using it more than 25 times a day. Some of the most useful PDA references for psychiatrists are gold standard clinical references, such as DSM-IV-TR, drug references and drug interaction guides­with over 71 percent of survey respondents crediting PDAs with helping them reduce medical errors. In fact, more than 16 percent of respondents said that by using a PDA they were able to eliminate over 10 percent of medical errors.

When asked how they use their PDAs, 68 percent of psychiatrists reported they rely on their PDA for treatment purposes­primarily using it for drug references, clinical references, drug interaction guides or treatment guidelines. When asked to quantify the specific benefits PDAs bring to their daily practice, 82 percent of respondents concluded that PDA use enables them to provide more care in less time.

In addition, Psychiatrists rely on more than one PDA reference. More than 78 percent of psychiatrist respondents have at least three medical references on their PDA. This is a higher percentage than the number of doctors using multiple references in the 2003 Skyscape survey.

An earlier survey by Skyscape found that handhelds, be it a PDA or smartphone, have made significant inroads into the medical industry in general. The survey from December 2003 showed that 85% of the 900 doctors who participated pointed to PDAs as helping to reduce the number of medical errors, with more than 50% indicating PDA use reduces their medical errors by more than 4-5%.

Source: PDA Street
posted by Kent 11:57 AM | |

May 4, 2004

 
Study Praises PDAs at the Point-of-Care

The March 1, 2004 issue of the American Journal of Medicine featured a survey on the "Identification of Drug-Drug Interactions with Personal Digital Assistant-Based Software," in which the ePocrates Rx Pro drug reference was highly rated. Based on defined patient profiles, prescriptions and drug-drug interaction pairs, the drug-drug interaction warnings from six PDA-based programs were documented and then used to calculate the sensitivity, specificity, negative predictive values and positive predictive values for each program.

The survey results suggest that the "software is effective in the identification of important drug-drug interactions and therefore has the potential to reduce the frequency of preventable adverse drug events," wrote the survey's authors Robert L. Robinson, MD, and Martha S. Buck, MD, of the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

The authors further emphasized that efforts to deploy such PDA-based programs in a wide range of clinical settings has the "potential to improve patient safety."
posted by Kent 5:23 PM | |

May 2, 2004

 
Surgical Logbook

Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli's article, "Handheld computers for surgical logbooks" (originally published in the International Journal of Surgery, 2004 vol 2 issue 1) is now available online. The logbook itself, a HanDBase database, is also available here free of charge.
posted by Kent 6:57 PM | |

Visit the Archives for previous news items.