Palmtops In The Operating Room
from the it's-about-time dept
The NY Times (registration and all) has an article about a hospital that actually realized that having doctors use handheld electronic devices was probably better than carrying around paper records. They describe the system which uses a wireless network to let the handhelds access data on a server. An earlier version had data on the device itself that needed to be synched, but that proved problematic as doctors would forget to do so. Some people are apparently worried about privacy issues of using wireless, but as they point out very clearly in the article, electronic data is much more secure than the current paper method most hospitals use. One doctor even points out that if you walk into a hospital with a white coat right now, you could probably walk anywhere you wanted to and pick up anyone's records.
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