Sign of the times?
The start of the 21st century hasn't been brilliant. Warfare, terrorism and all sorts of cruelty and evil abound.
Duct tape and plastic sheets obviously ain't enough. You can arm your PDA with info to help you:
1) eMedicine.com, the publisher of the world¹s largest online, current medical reference, has compiled its extensive collection of terrorism-related medical content into a free PDA eBook for medical professionals and the public. This customized book fills recent requests for a reliable information source following the recent terrorist attacks . The PDA reference includes nearly 2,000 pages of the most current information on Trauma, Terrorism, and Biochemical and Radiologic Warfare. The book is designed for field and hospital work and will run on both PALM and Pocket PC PDAs.

2) 1st AID v1.4 (also free ) has been updated to include a Terrorist Incidents section .

If you are a radiologist or trainee in the field, you might appreciate the handy info on your Palm from PocketRadiologist. The demo pages look impressive and there seems to be a wealth of information available in various categories like Brain, Musculoskeletal etc.
I tried to download and run the demo on my Tungsten and sadly it crashed. Maybe the application is not fully OS5 compatible yet.

PDAlive has this snippet about PatientKeeper offering medical dictation and transcription facilities. This area has always been the bane of medicos. I have gone down this path before using an Olympus digital voice recorder and software to convert speech to text (the Olympus bundles IBM's ViaVoice). I found it kinda cumbersome and at the end of the day, my trusty m515 and PPK was a much faster solution. Printing the letters via IR to my Canon IR printer too is a breeze. Now with my Tungsten T, I am still doing the same thing. But as the TT has Voice Recording, I may try out the dictation thing again. I am not sure how PatientKeeper will offer their services based on handhelds but my guess is it would be based on PDAs with voice recording facilities.

The Palm and Insomnia

Here are two things which may help you if you can't sleep (using your Palm of course):

1) Sheep counter

Description:
Finally, the traditional ''falling asleep'' remedy is available for Palm.
Don''t buy expensive beds or use uncomfortable leg pillows, download this program onto your Palm and you will have a restful night sleep or triple your money back ($0.00 x 3 = $0.00).

2) Load an extremely boring e-book into your Palm and begin reading.......

Added chatterbox today....

The PDA marches on in the medical field.....

Handhelds and Healthcare Innovation

Healthcare organizations are turning to Handheld computers to streamline business processes and improve overall patient care. Using Palm handheld computers, healthcare providers can access and manage critical information at the point of care, where decision support is so critical.

Palm's focus on promoting solutions that assist in addressing critical healthcare issues -- patient safety, quality of care, decision support, HIPAA compliance, security -- has made the company a leading handheld provider for the healthcare industry. And because the open, flexible platform integrates easily with existing technology infrastructures, Palm handhelds also have become the preferred choice among healthcare administrators and IT managers. ......


Read the full article in Palminfocenter

Wouldn't I love to have a prescription writing utility on my Palm. This would save lots of time especially when it comes to repeat prescriptions. There's also the real possibility of drug interactions and the software could provide warnings as well as pick up dosing errors (hey, doctors are human).




But I guess all this is a dream until the hospital where I work updates its antiquated HIS, LIS and its overall IT system. Medcheck looks like on interesting piece of software

Of course there is the big advantage of e-prescriptions. It would do away with the problem of bad doctors' handwriting ;)