The Doctor's PDA and Smartphone Handbook: Personal Digital Assistant

Abstract

What do drug dealers and doctors have in common? From the 1980s onwards neither could do their job without a pager. Only by carrying a pager can junior doctors leave their wards, safe in the knowledge that they would be paged about their patients’ needs. The same junior doctors also feel safer knowing that they can page their senior at any time to get advice and support. And of course the code blue message on pagers is essential to the ability of the cardiac arrest team to respond quickly wherever its individual members are dispersed in the hospital. Handheld computers promise an even bigger qualitative contribution to clinical workflow. Not only can you use a handheld computer to do your clinical work faster and better than before, you can do some things that colleagues without these devices are simply incapable of doing.