Untapped power: A physician's handheld

Doctors are buying personal digital assistants, although not necessarily for clinical purposes. But new technology and a federal push to e-health could change that.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Jan. 17, 2005.

Richard Raborn, MD, a solo internist in Boynton Beach, Fla., is like a lot of physicians when it comes to his personal digital assistant. Since shelling out $400 for a Treo 600 from palmOne in spring 2004, Dr. Raborn has used the handheld device primarily as a communication rather than an office productivity tool.

"It's more of a phone and little bit of a reference tool to look up [physicians' and patients'] names, addresses, faxes and phone numbers," Dr. Raborn said.

He wants to use it for more clinical tasks eventually, but "I haven't had enough time to really do what I want to do with it," Dr. Raborn said, explaining that converting his practice into a concierge practice consumed most of his attention and energy in 2004.

When handheld devices hit the market, many experts predicted that physicians, even those who weren't early adopters of computers and health technology, would quickly find use for a device that seemed to fit right into their busy lives, their need to have access to information and their constant mobility.

And those predictions were correct. About 40% of practicing physicians owned a personal digital assistant in 2004, up from 19% in 2001 and more than four times greater than the overall percentage rate of consumer adoption, said Mark Bard, president of Manhattan Research LLC, a market research company in New York.

But the other end of those predictions hasn't held up -- that physicians would find PDAs useful as a clinical tool. Although physician adoption of PDAs in the past four years soared for various reasons, the devices have yet to come close to being used for their fullest potential in medicine.