Leveraging Palm Technology in the Advanced Practice Nursing Environment

Abstract

The use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) in healthcare has expanded exponentially in the past several years. In addition to common feature functions such as contact lists, calculators, calendars, and expense logs, current PDAs boast a wide variety of practical healthcare-related applications such pharmacologic databases, infectious disease programs, medication calculators, and patient scheduling and billing applications. This article examines PDAs in general and the Palm series of handheld devices in particular for use in the advanced practice setting. These devices have several implications for advanced practice nursing including support of both differential diagnosis and diagnostic reasoning, reduction of medication errors, and development of effective treatment protocols. Personal digital assistant technology will inevitably become part and parcel of advanced practice nursing. The rapid, almost daily, changes in the healthcare environment require immediate access to the myriad resources and databases used by advanced practice nurses. Personal digital assistant technology provides such access.

Pharmacists’ utilization and interest in usage of personal digital assistants in their professional responsibilities

“…Survey items were developed based on previously reported literature on the various uses of PDAs by healthcare professionals as well as by conducting a content validation process 3,4,6,9–14 . Content validation of the instrument was performed by conducting a pilot study with three faculty members at the institution who used a PDA.…”

“…Pharmacoinformatics, a distinct branch in the field of informatics, is defined as ‘a discipline where technology is used for the preparation, delivery and management of medication use within health care delivery systems’ 2 . Personal digital assistants (PDAs), an emerging tool in the field of pharmacoinformatics, are effective in providing services at the point of patient care, and the past few years have witnessed an exponential increase in their use within the healthcare industry 3,4 …”

“…Health professionals use PDAs at the point of care for managing various disease states such as hypertension, diabetes, asthma and cardiac abnormalities 10 . Besides the common utilities such as contact lists, calendars and expense logs, current PDAs are used as pharmacological databases, disease management programmes, pharmaceutical calculators and for patient scheduling 4 …”

Development and Testing of an Evaluation Scale of Personal Digital Assistants

“…This finding confirms reports that one of the best benefits of using PDAs in clinical settings is as a portable drug reference for instant data retrieval. 2,18,37,38 The other factor, user support, was related to reporting PDA problems and obtaining support from the IS department. Although problems could be reported anytime, as shown by the positive average score of 2.77, support was not available, as revealed by the negative average score of 2.43 and comments.…”

“…13,14 Furthermore, the use of PDAs has been proposed in nursing for data collection, in establishing pharmacologic databases, in infectious disease programs, as medication calculators, and for patient scheduling and billing applications. 2,[15][16][17] PDAs have been used to document trauma patients' condition at point of care. 18 However, the use of PDAs in this situation was limited by the need for a hospitalwide integrated interface to allow rapid updating of patient records from the central computer, rather than beaming data between team members.…”