The Adoption of Pdas within the Health Care Sector: Improving Work Practices and Service Delivery in Ambulatory Care

The adoption of PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) with mobile communication capability has the potential to improve work practice and efficiency in the health care sector. Ambulatory care workers, particularly, might welcome the prospect of point of care availability and capture of client information. A key factor in the lack of adoption of such systems, is that traditionally, health care information systems have been designed for desktop computing, whereas many healthcare workers are highly mobile. It is expected that new technologies of hand-held devices will change this. This paper outlines work in progress towards the development of a PDA based point of care e-health solution. The introduction of an ambulatory care information system (ACIS) is part of this project. A detailed outline of the proposed research is provided. Initial stages of the research have included a detailed workflow analyisis an essential first step in the integration of work practices with PDA applications.