Editorial The Usefulness of Personal Digital Assistants for Health Care Providers Today and in the Future

During the past few years, personal digital assistants(PDAs) have become hot commodities, similarly to desk-top and laptop computers and cellular telephones.Many health care providers—physicians in particular—regularly use PDAs in their everyday work. In some countries, their use has ap-proached the saturation level of 90%.1 Only a fraction of those physicians who report that they use a PDA actually use it in medical practice, however—typically only 26 to 28 % of physicians overall. We can infer that, like many busy people, physicians use PDAs ’ Microsoft Outlook-type functions out-side clinical practice, for making personal appointments and using the calendar and contact information windows. The questions I have been curious about for some time regarding the usefulness of PDAs in medical care are the ones I address in this editorial: For what purposes do health care providers use PDAs in their medical practice today? What potential uses of PDAs available in the near future will help clinicians to provide the best evidence-based care in today’s demanding health care delivery climate? In this issue of Southern Medical Journal, Torre and Wright2 review the clinical and educational uses of PDAs. They satisfactorily answer my first question concerning the present uses of PDAs. In the patient care arena, they describe the three most important common clinical applications: ac-cess to inpatient and outpatient data, billing, and guideline-and clinical decision-based support tools, such as the down-loadable American Academy of Pediatrics asthma guideline