Lightening their Pockets; Using PDA's for clinical rotations

Mark W Platt, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, Shreveport, Louisiana, USA

ABSTRACT:

Uses of hand Held devices during clinical rotations.

The Louisiana State University medical school in Shreveport has had a compulsory laptop purchase program in place for the past six years. While this has been a substantial addition to both the curriculum and time management skills of the students the laptops are used less during the clinical years. We instituted a pilot program using both Palm based and PocketPC devices.

Thirty students were supplied with a PDA, one group received a package of freeware programs while in the second group we supplied a commercially developed dictionary and two of the five minute clinical consult programs of the students choice. The students monitored in two ways. Primarily, by interview on a monthly basis recording frequency of use, satisfaction and utility. In addition the original group was monitored by a software program intended to record actual use.

All of the regular users maintained constant use of the personal information management (PIM) features of the device this was considered invaluable for maintaining the schedule of the many meetings and presentations during the clinical rotations. Interestingly although the devices were originally configured to synchronize with MS Outlook ( the medical center's e-mail program) the students all chose to keep their appointments directly on the palm device rather than on their laptops and synchronize with the devices. Programs used most frequently (generally greater than once daily, where appropriate) include the drug database Epocrates and the dictionary. The clinical consult software was used in certain rotations. The usage pattern amongst all the students was similar.

Without any doubt the introduction of the handheld devices has been a success. Of the thirty students in the trial only two were not using them on a daily basis throughout their rotations. This was due to technical aspects that they chose not to resolve. It should be noted however that these students did self-select for this study so that the number of technical problems when these machines are introduced to the entire class may increase.

The use of PDA type devices is becoming increasingly common, the experiment was designed to study their utility for medical students. It is clear from our preliminary studies that the devices have useful application and may replace the "pocket overload" of reference books which medical students face.

The clinical orientation manual is available as a "Silo" document readable on both platforms.

We intend to provide many more internal documents in this form in the near future.

This experiment has been so successful it has been terminated and the whole class of 2004 will be purchasing palm-based devices for their clinical years.

BENEFIT TO PARTICIPANTS ATTENDING SESSION:

While the introduction of PDA devices is occurring piecemeal we have instituted an experiment to see how students use the devices and what programs they consider useful. We will report on what our students consider "works best".

Mark W Platt

Biometry-LSUHSCS

1501 Kings Highway

Shreveport LA 71130

Phone: 318-6754452

Fax: 318 675 7577

Email: mailto:mplatt@lsuhsc.edu