A study of PDA and Smartphone adoption rates at King Saud Medical City Hospitals

Abstract

The estimate of adoption rates of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and Smart phones among physicians and dentists is required to accurately determine how much PDA devices can improve the quality of care, save patients' lives, increase productivity and ultimately reduce health-care cost. This research worked towards finding Prevalence rates of PDA and Smartphone among the physicians and dentists at King Saud Medical City Hospitals (KSMCH) of Ministry of Health, Saudi Arabia and evaluated its impact on work performance and clinical practice. A cross-sectional was developed and distributed to physicians and dentists in King Saud Medical City Hospitals. Main results from the research showed that PDA and Smart phone prevalence (use) rate is 69.1% among Physicians and Dentists at KSMCH. This is very comparable to a recent research study result in USA. A very high percentage of participants (88.9% of male and 90.0% of female participants) strongly agreed that PDA improve their performance and their work productivity The study statistics showed that the most common application used for the PDA was for obtaining drug information ( with 97.4% of participants) followed by using PDA for medical research (63.2%). Our study agrees partially with findings of other researchers in developed world that PDA advanced technology devices have become a valuable and popular tool in various fields of medicine but it also differs significantly with it in the type of medical fields application most commonly used by study participants.