Outline
 | Scheduled project events |
| Milestones and Deliverables. |
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are showing their worth as powerful tools for clinicians, medical students and teachers. Their adoption is more widespread than in most other professions, with a vast array of resources and aids to practice available on the net. However, while many physicians use PDAs as daily organisers, far fewer take advantage of these clinical aids and teaching tools. This project aims to extend their usefulness in these areas.
The project is focusing on the clinical, educational and evaluative aspects of these powerful tools. Point-of-care delivery of information and data acquisition is essential to the success of informatics and its pervasion into the medical environment. Connecting clinicians to the vast array of information resources has been a significant challenge - this project is exploring various means of connectivity - asynchronous, high-speed wireless LANs, low-bandwidth high-efficiency wide-area communications.
A key tenet of the project is platform independence - rather than get locked into committing to one PDA platform or another, we are striving to achieve some agnosis - at the moment, we are supporting both the PocketPC and Palm OS platforms. For more information about this, see here.
For a more detailed summary of the PocketProf Project, click here for an outline of the project as a Word document.
Events
Rural Faculty Development Workshop - Kananaskis, Feb 8th-11th, 2001. PocketProf was featured during the Friday morning workshop. Contact Patricia Lishman for more details about this workshop.
PDA Workshop -- June 5th, 2001.
Drumheller Workshop -- September 29th, 2001.
Family Medicine Forum -- Vancouver, October 24th-27th, 2001.
Kananaskis Workshop -- February 8th-9th, 2002.
Resident Orientation -- June 25th, 2002
Kananaskis Workshop -- February 7th-8th, 2003
Resident Orientation -- June 28th, 2003
Kananaskis Workshop -- February 6th-7th, 2004
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Milestones and Deliverables
Stage 1 - Jan - March 2001
Pilot groups - rollout of devices, initial software package. Testing of compatibility, usability. Selected users.
Stage 2 -- April - June 2001
Extension to broader group, including selected students and residents. Distribution of first custom applications.
Stage 3 -- July - June 2002
Extension to other groups such as students and residents, community faculty.