Mobile Technology Speeds up Processes for Indiana U. Med School Students

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Mobile Technology Speeds up Processes for Indiana U. Med School Students

7/31/2006

By Linda L. Briggs

Personal digital assistants, or PDAs, have proven especially popular with medical schools, where the volume of data such devices store for easy retrieval can help students easily access both clinical data and reference materials.

At Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, a PDA initiative has replaced paper forms that were creating time lags of days or weeks. The handheld program has enhanced the school’s learning environment and improved efficiency. The university has nine different satellite campuses throughout Indiana, and all third- and fourth-year medical students from any of the other eight campuses come to Indianapolis at some point for clerkship rotations.

The push for a new system occurred when the accrediting body for U.S. medical schools introduced a new mandate, according to Information Systems Librarian Amy Hatfield and Assistant Director of Educational Technologies Michael Bangert. Under the new rules, medical students must track their clinical rotations, documenting what they are actually seeing in encounters with patients, and how those encounters relate back to learning objectives.

“Previously, we were using paper forms,” Hatfield says. That meant a lag of days or even weeks in collecting data from the students, entering it, evaluating it, and reporting back to students on what they’d completed. “They might have moved on to another clerkship before they found out that they hadn’t really completed all the objectives of the previous one,” Hatfield says.

The program that evolved in response now requires that all third and fourth-year medical students purchase a PDA – a target audience of nearly 600 students at IU. Data is entered by students into the PDAs during or after rotations, and g'es directly to a central server for collection and analysis. That allows students and clerkship directors to check at any time to see which requirements have been completed during a rotation.

To keep the PDAs affordable, IU works with CDW Government, Inc., a subsidiary of CDW Corp. that supplies IT solutions to governments and educators. IU medical students can purchase a package that includes the device, a memory card, and extended warranty, directly from CDW-G via a customized Web page.

The program d'esn’t stipulate a device type, requiring only that the PDA run the Palm operating system. The university encourages the Palm TX model because of its built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities, and 128K memory – helpful because applications can fit on the appliance without an SD card to furnish extra memory. “They can choose something else,” Hatfield says, “and we will do our best [to support it], but our real commitment is to the TX.”