Mobile computing technology, including smart phones and personal digital assistants, is becoming more common in health care facilities as physicians, nurses and administrators put the technology to use, according to a new study.

Spyglass Consulting Group of Menlo Park, Calif., performed a study, "Healthcare Without Bounds: Trends in Mobile Computing," released in November. The group interviewed 100 physicians, nurses and administrators.

Nurses who use the technology say it helps them work more efficiently and provide a higher quality of care. Yet nurses agree with the findings of the study: A number of roadblocks still stand in the way of mobile computing being used more widely.

The market for mobile computing in health care was $50 million in 2002, and is expected to grow to $1.2 billion by 2006, according to the study. That growth is fueled by a renewed focus on patient safety, said Gregg Malkary, managing director of Spyglass.

"It was kind of the carrot that the industries needed in order to focus more on clinical IT [information technology]," he said.

Other factors in the increased demand were concerns over a shortage of health care workers and a desire to maximize staff hours by being more efficient, Malkary said.

Only about 5 percent of the people interviewed were nurses. They were interested in using the technology, especially for documentation, Malkary said.

"A lot of them feel kind of inundated with the documentation they do," he said. "Nurses often have to wait 'til the end of the shift to write. If they have the way to do it as they go, this could significantly improve their efficiency."

The Central Coast Visiting Nurses Association and Hospice in Monterey, Calif., and Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, Pa., are two facilities offering this option.

Before nurses at the Visiting Nurses Association head out for home visits, they download their daily schedules and patient charts from the main server into a handheld computer about half the size of a laptop, said Larry Garrett, MA, director of clinical services at the association.

"Nurses can do more and see more patients in a day than if they were handwriting," he said.

At Lehigh, nurses use laptops wheeled into patient rooms to record vital signs, intake and output, medication administration, IVs and pain assessment.

"The impetus certainly is to streamline documentation for our nursing staff, that's part of having tools and resources close to them, so they don't always have to come to a central location to do their documentation," said Terry Capuano, MSN, senior vice president for clinical services.

Nurses who use the technology say they prefer it.

"I wouldn't want to go back to the way we had things," said Debra Peter, RN. "It has so many advantages and it makes the delivery of care so much safer."

But this kind of use doesn't appear to be widespread. Only 5 percent of the hospitals interviewed for the study were using the full capacity of the technology, including e-prescribing and patient data management, according to the study.

Administrators in the study said a number of roadblocks, including whether clinicians would adopt the technology, the difficulty of getting it to mesh with existing technology and concerns over patient privacy limited their use.

Nursing experts, including Carol Bickford, Ph.D., RN and a senior policy fellow in the department of nursing practice and policy at the American Nurses Association, say additional hurdles must be cleared.

Bickford said that simply using the technology efficiently is an issue.

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