Instead, she sees a small handheld device that puts a rich catalog of medical resources at the fingertips of future doctors, enabling them to access a variety of information as they move from the classroom to the laboratory and into clinical settings. Moffett is the medical student who helped organize a pilot program launched last fall to equip 240 Stanford medical students with Palm Vx Organizers that integrate digital and Web-based learning into their education while also familiarizing them with a future tool of medicine. The Stanford Mobile Med project is being funded by the School of Medicine's Lane Medical Library, and has recently announced development agreements with some of the biggest names in personal digital assistant, or PDA, software providers.
Doctors are very mobile.
They need to have access to information in a mobile way. Phyllis Gardner, senior associate dean for education and student affairs at the medical school, echoed the belief that doctors will increasingly rely on the mobility of PDA-type devices. Instead of the notebook that physicians traditionally carried around, future doctors will have PDAs to access patient histories, results of physicals, other electronic medical records and laboratory information. We're training students for that. It's just a simple little file, but when it's on a PDA you don't have to worry about tracking down the piece of paper.