PDAs helping future doctors learn medical ABCs

Physicians today face the daunting task of absorbing an ever-growing mountain of information. Thanks to frequent discoveries that recommend new treatments or diagnostic methods, plus the introduction of hundreds of new medications every year, it's difficult for even the brightest doctors to take it all in.

To help prepare future doctors for this information overload, the University of Louisville School of Medicine has begun issuing Personal Digital Assistants to all its medical students. The PDAs include specialized medical software that lets students check potential drug reactions or get a "second opinion" on a bedside diagnosis.

The new strategy for increasing student interaction with technology was introduced at UofL in the fall of 2001, when every third-year medical student was provided with a Palm Vx PDA at the beginning of his or her clinical rotation. The program was then expanded this year to equip all students with Palm 500s.

"More and more studies have shown that the use of hand-held technology among physicians is skyrocketing," explained Ruth Greenberg, Ph.D., director of health sciences academic programming. "We wanted to introduce this new tool to our students as they began their clinical rotations and investigate its impact on their learning experiences and ability to care for patients."

The Palm Vx PDAs were pre-loaded with a variety of clinical software, including ePocrates, PatientKeeper and 5 Minute Clinical Consult. In addition, each PDA had an application that tracked how often the student used the PDA and which applications were being used. Students were required to sync this data monthly at a central workstation.

Using the tracking system, focus groups and questionnaires completed by students and preceptors, program organizers concluded that the PDAs were a positive addition to the educational experience. Pradip Patel, M.D., principal investigator on the project, presented the results at the national meeting of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Joel Kaplan, M.D., dean of the School of Medicine, was so encouraged by the initial findings that he committed to supply the technology to every medical student at UofL in 2002.

"We plan to orient our students to this technology from day one," Greenberg said. "We'll be watching the first- and second-year classes very closely. We hope that when they enter their third-year clinical rotations with at least one year of usage under their belts they'll very naturally integrate the technology into patient care."