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The US Robotics Palm Pilot is a neat gadget,
Is a palmtop any use for medicine?
Dinky
Pad is a drawing program for it, excellent for doodling in
meetings, or taking down a phone number quickly.
It is slightly better than the other sketchpad application I have
seen, which is however freeware.
Also see Jim's
Health Care PalmPilot Page for health related programs for
the Pilot.
I tried the Pendragon Forms program. It worked, but requiring an Access database on WIndows reduced its usefulness after a while.
A potentially useful tool, I think.
The Palm Desktop version 3 is an improvement on the previous version. And the Pocket Chess program is amazing. The SUN StarOffice and other programs on Linux synchronise well with the Palm, and there is no reasons why any others should not.
Linus Benedict Torvalds. No doubt about it.
Richard Dawkins is a hero and the unofficial website maintained by John Cataljo is superb.
"I don't think we're for anything, we're just products of evolution. You can say `Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose', but I'm anticipating a good lunch." - - Dr. James Watson
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy,
education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary.
Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of
punishment and hope of reward after death."
[Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science",
New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930]
Roy Sharma and the other members of the "Patients not Paper" working group are heroes to GPs at least.
See the Tree Preservation site for more details.
Pratchett. See The annotated Pratchett for anyone who doubts this.
The devisers and implementors of Make A Shorter Link
William R Della Croce Jr
Crayon Vertriebs and Frhr. v. Gravenreuth
Undoubtedly the marketing executive from British American Tobacco, David Bacon "Head of Corporate Communication"
And his boss Martin Broughton, and Geoffrey Bible, CEO of Philip Morris.
Mealy mouthed obfuscators and corporate criminals, all of them.
Godfrey
Rhodes, Canter & Siegel, Sanford Wallace. Wasters of ridiculously large amounts of time.
But Reuters sold all their interest to Cegedin, who can hardly
be blamed for what has gone before.
Reuters share price jumped immediately afterward. Good move.
Score one for the curse of Midgley? Or perhaps it was a stupid
corporate strategy, as I thought and said at the time.
The damage remains.
Ars Longa, IT Brevis. The pathway to reliable persistent medical record software that general practices and their patients can depend upon is the path of open source. See OSHCA for a start.
Since taking over Micro Solutions their support of the medical record system I use had been unsatisfactory to the time when I fired them. There had been considerable doubt expressed about the truth of their original declarations that they would support the users, which later changed to a requirement that we all migrate to the appalling Vamp Vision product.
This sort of messing around diverts much NHS time and money from looking after patients, and Vamp's motives appeared to be purely commercial. I preffered that they had no place in NHS work.
I am not using it for actual medicine at present, but given a message-based medical record system I would probably be. This posting is from Fam-Med.
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 18:06:44 -0700 From: "Michael Hogarth,MD"Subject: PDA Research in the literature There have been some small non-scientific studies done on various aspects of PDA use in medicine. Many of these came along after the first release of the Newton in the early 90's which carried with it alot of press and interest by many. Since then, the excitement over PDAs has dwindled as has interest in such studies. Perhaps the latest release of palmtop devices will generate more interest as they are more portable and powerful than their predecessors. Nevertheless, there are some small pieces of information that can be gleaned from the informatics literature on past versions of PDAs. Many of these 'pearls' are still relevant even with today's devices as the issues they cover are related to the information/content rather than the technology. Here are the references: Labkoff SE, et al. The Constellation Project: Experience and Evaluation of Personal Digital Assistants in the Clinical Environment. Proceedings of the Symposium of Computer Applications in Medicine (SCAMC), 1995.pp678-682 **this is the best one of the lot** Le PP,et al. Using a Pen-Based Computer to Collect Health-Related Quality of Life and Utilities Information. SCAMC, 1995. pp.839-843. (this one focuses on patient use in the waiting room as they provide information on themselves. It details their user-acceptance but in a very small group) Grant AM, et al. Evaluation of the Newton Pen-Pad as a tool for collecting clinical research data at the bedside. SCAMC, 1996. 738-741 Karshmer JF, et al. Hand-held Computing in the Patient Care Setting: A Pilot Project. SCAMC, 1995. 7-11. Shabot, MM, et al. Real-Time Wireless Decision Support Alerts on a Palmtop PDA., SCAMC, 1995. 174-177. Acuff RD, et al. Mobile Access to Oncology Knowledge. SCAMC, 1996. 956-741. Michael Hogarth,MD Assistant Professor, Internal Medicine Deputy Clinical Director, Center for Medical Informatics UC Davis Health System
http://informatics.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu