WLAN PDA to improve efficiency in patient care documentation.
Tomohiro Sawa, Takashi Funahara, Hirokazu Nagatani, Masaharu Okahara, Keiko Sase, Yoshinori Nakata, Lucila Ohno‐Machado · PubMed · 2005
Mobile solutions have been progressively being adopted in clinical settings. Real-time data access is expected to improve the efficiency of clinical work. We built a hospital-wide Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) that connects PDAs. A PDA application for nursing documentation was the first to be implemented. In this study, we compared the patterns of PDA and desktop data entry by the nurses in a large academic hospital in Japan. During the study period, 98,633 records were entered. Thirty seven percent of the data were entered via a PDA and 63% from desktop PCs. Thirty seven percent of the nurses used PDA for entering more than 50% of the data. Thirty five percent of the nurses used PDAs for less than 10% of the data. Since nurses entered data via the PDA on average 16 minutes earlier than on the desktops, the results suggest that the WLAN PDA application may improve the efficiency in documentation.