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August 29, 2005

 
Docs Prefer Mobile Phones to Pagers

I can relate to this. If I could get my local hospital to support SMS messaging to my Treo 650, I could ditch my pager once and for all.

A British medical journal study found that physicians equipped with mobile phones responded more quickly to a call than they had with pagers. Nine physicians at St. Mary's Hospital in London took part in the six-week study last year, titled "Handheld computers and the 21st Century Surgical Team: A Pilot Study."

The physicians were given mobile phones that also had a PDA operating system to use during the study. The study found that physicians had a lower failure of response rate when compared with their use of the hospital's existing paging technology. The study also found that the combined technology helped reduce physicians' nervousness toward technology.

The results have been published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, a London-based, peer-reviewed medical journal. A larger-scale trial of the technologies is being planned.

Source: Mobile Health Data
posted by Kent 9:07 PM | |

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