Abstract
BackgroundPersonal Digital Assistants (PDAS) are rapidly becoming popular tools in the assistance of managing hospitalized patients, but little is known about how often expert recommendations are available for the treatment of infectious diseases in hospitalized patients.ObjectiveTo determine how often PDAs could provide expert recommendations for the management of infectious diseases in patients admitted to a general medicine teaching service.DesignProspective observational cohort studySettingInternal medicine resident teaching service at an urban hospital in Dayton, OhioPatients212 patients (out of 883 patients screened) were identified with possible infectious etiologies as the cause for admission to the hospital.MeasurementsPatients were screened prospectively from July 2002 until October 2002 for infectious conditions as the cause of their admissions. 5 PDA programs were assessed in October 2002 to see if treatment recommendations were available for managing these patients. The programs were then reassessed in January 2004 to evaluate how the latest editions of the software would perform under the same context as the previous year.ResultsPDAs provided treatment recommendations in at least one of the programs for 100% of the patients admitted over the 4 month period in the 2004 evaluation. Each of the programs reviewed improved from 2002 to 2004, with five of the six programs offering treatment recommendations for over 90% of patients in the study.ConclusionCurrent PDA software provides expert recommendations for a great majority of general internal medicine patients presenting to the hospital with infectious conditions.
Highlights
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAS) are rapidly becoming popular tools in the assistance of managing hospitalized patients, but little is known about how often expert recommendations are available for the treatment of infectious diseases in hospitalized patients
Current PDA software provides expert recommendations for a great majority of general internal medicine patients presenting to the hospital with infectious conditions
A survey done by the America College of Physician predicted that 67% of physicians would be using PDAs by the end of 2002 [1]
Summary
Miami Valley Hospital is an 827 bed secondary and tertiary referral center, in Dayton, Ohio. It is an urban hospital that averages over three-thousand patient admissions per month. The internal medicine resident teaching service consists of two teams, each team with 2 senior residents and 2 interns who are supervised by an attending physician. There is a senior resident and intern on call in the hospital at all times. Patients were eligible to be admitted to resident's service if they were established within the Medical-Surgical Health Center of Miami Valley Hospital, if they were uninsured or if they had insurance but were without a local physician (a.k.a. private unattached patients). The general medicine teaching service averages approximately eight admissions per twenty-four hour period
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