WHAT ARE THEY?   Anaesthetists are among the most computer-literate group in medicine.  They have not been slow to adopt these handy devices for their use in the field of anaesthesia.  Hand-held computers, or personal digital assistants (PDAs) have made remarkable advances in recent years, with the advent of colour screens, increased memory capacity and more medical software appearing every month.  There are two major platforms (operating systems): Pocket PC and Palm.  The third platform is confined to Psion  devices and they are very popular in the UK, although Psion have announced that they are to leave the hand-held market.  Palm machines are available from Palm, Handspring and Sony.  Pocket PC machines are available from Compaq, Casio, Toshiba, NEC and HP.

WHO USES THEM?  Grant Turner (RPH Anaesthetist) uses a Compaq iPAQ as a diary, planner and contact manager.  Jennifer Morgan (Pain Specialist, RPH) has her whole life on her Palm.  Jilda Levene, RN (Staff Development Educator, RPH Theatres) uses a Nokia smartphone as a diary, a spare "brain" and for doing minutes for the various nursing committees she represents. In the UK, Registrars use a Psion-based anaesthesia logbook or more recently a program compatible with Pocket PC operating system.  More information is available from the Royal College of Anaesthetists.   The RPH Pain Servicehas been testing various PDAs with dedicated pain service data collection programs.  Richard Riley (RPH Anaesthetist) uses a Toshiba e800 as a diary, calender, scheduler (Microsoft Outlook) and a handy list of drug infusions and doses (taken from this website!).  Mark Whitby and Andrew Clapin use Palms in their daily private practice.  Mark recommends the Avantgo site; it not only does newspaper summaries and movie guides etc but also has a daily question and answer on various medical topics including anaesthesia. Peter Read uses a Nokia 9110 combination mobile phone and handheld machine daily.   Andrew Miller even has a Palm-based billing program in the works.

FURTHER INFORMATION.  Apart from the preinstalled software, such as Pocket Word, Outlook, Excel, there are some favourite programs among anaesthetists. The ASA has included the Relative Value Guide for the Palm OS.  The MIMS Drug Manual is now available for PDAs. There is a free drug database from ePocrates.  There are dedicated sites for medical uses of hand-held computers and PDAs, such as MedsPDA and  HandheldMed.  Other sites, such as BrightHand, Handango, PalmGear,  Avantgo and PocketGear have a broader audience.  There is also a section on the Virtual Anesthesia Textbook devoted to these devices.

Disclaimer: mention of certain brand-name products, organisations and companies is not intended to be endorsement by the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists or the Australian Society of Anaesthetists and represents the opinions of Richard Riley.