Hospitals, doctors and the medical profession in general have always been on the cutting edge of mobile technology. The more data that is at a healthcare professionals fingertips, the safer and more timely treatment and service can be provided.

Some mobile medical solutions mobilize billing or patient management, for example, while others put detailed data about diseases and treatment in the hands of a practitioners. Skyscape is one fo the most successful companies at providing the latter capabilities for the Palm and Pocket PC platforms.

The company has announced new line of solutions called Constellation suites that are customized for individual medical specialties and practitioners.

According to Skyscape, the suites are comprised of references and clinical decision making tools integrated using Skyscape's smARTlink technology, which allows users to cross-link between any of the companies 180 handheld references. References and tools include clinical references, drug guides, drug interaction analyzers, medical calculators, ICD-9 coding tools and more.

The goal of the solution is to be as comprehensive as possible for each specialty. Sandeep Shah, Skyscape President and CEO said "our goal is to provide a complete, integrated solution that contains the most popular, proven references and decision-making tools for individual specialties."

The first five Constellation suites are for Anesthesiology, Cardiology, Emergency Medicine, Nursing and Pediatrics. Skyscape plans to introduce Constellation suites for additional specialties later this year.

Survey Says...

A survey of health professionals given by Skyscape late last year demonstrated that 85% of the 900 doctors who participated pointed to PDAs as helping to reduce the number of medical errors, with more than 50% indicating PDA use reduces their medical errors by more than 4-5%.

With the National Academy of Science – Institute of Medicine reporting that medical errors cost the healthcare system $2 billion a year, this equates to preventing more than $100 million in preventable drug errors alone. Less than 20% of medical professionals, however, have their PDA software integrated with the larger hospital IT enterprise (prescription, billing, charge capture or patient records systems).

According to Skycape, respondents stated that PDA use provides significant benefits by enabling them to spend more time with patients, while still treating more each day, and by improving the overall quality of patient care.