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University of Missouri - Columbia
IAIMS Progress Report to IAIMS Consortium
May 2003
A Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)-based Alerting Service
for Clinicians at the University of Missouri - Columbia
Purpose: To evaluate the utility of delivering information about newly updated library resources to clinicians' PDAs.
Setting/Participants/Resources: Volunteer clinician Palm PDA users at an academic health sciences center.
Brief Description: This project involves a method of notifying clinicians and medical students when new medical information sources are available by sending them messages on their PDAs. Upon registration, participants receive headlines delivered to their Palm devices alerting them to new books, guidelines from the National Guidelines Clearinghouse, Cochrane Reviews, and NIH clinical alerts, as well as new or updated content in UpToDate, Harrison's Online, Scientific American Medicine, and Clinical Evidence. The clinicians then can request additional information on any of the headlines, which will be delivered to them via email after they hotsync.
Headlines and corresponding details are stored in a database, which is created by parsing incoming email alerts.
Fifteen volunteers have downloaded the software and are participating in the test; a mixture of faculty attendings, residents, advance practice nurses, and medical students. The number of headlines requested per participant has varied widely, from no headlines requested at all to an average of two requests per hotsync.
Here is a breakdown of the sources of the headlines requested as of April 25, 2003:
- Scientific American Medicine: 30% (12 requests among 40 headlines)
- Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews: 29% (16 requests among 55 headlines)
- UpToDate: 22% (4 requests among 18 headlines)
- Clinical Evidence: 20% (1 request among 5 headlines)
- Harrison's Online: 18% (11 requests among 62 headlines)
- National Guidelines Clearinghouse: 13% (9 requests out of 71 headlines)
- New books: 6% (8 requests out of 142 books)
- Two NIH clinical alerts were entered as headlines, but they generated no requests.
Next steps: To make the source code and database schema available to other institutions via open source to allow for collaboration and refinement. When available, the files will be linked from this page: http://www.muhealth.org/~library/pdapages/sourcecode.html
For additional information on the technical implementation, see Paul Pancoast's poster at the May 27, 2003 IAIMS Consortium meeting: "A PDA Alerts System for the Health Sciences Library". |
