The personal digital assistant appears to have reached the tipping point in healthcare, according to a wealth of new evidence. In an opinion piece for the California Health Care Foundation, health economist Jane Sarahson Kahn writes that the evidence is now fairly conclusive. A report by Manhattan Research in December found that 50 percent of physicians are using PDAs. Another recent study found that more than 60 percent of physicians using drug reference software reported avoiding at least one adverse event. Doing particularly well as a result of the trend is Epocrates, the company that makes the most widely used drug reference software on the market. Epocrates' business model is currently based on mining its user base, but it's trying to get involved with transactions like ePrescribing. PDAs are currently used far less for transactions than for reference.
- read this article [1] from iHealthBeat.org
- see my blog [2] entry on The Health Care Blog
Links:
[1] http://www.ihealthbeat.org/index.cfm?Action=dspItem&itemid=119658
[2] http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2006/03/tech_jsk_on_pda.html