Wall Street Journal: PDAs Become Useful Tools Among Doctors

PDAs Become Useful Tools Among Doctors

By Trish Saywell

SINGAPORE - WHEN A WOMAN in her 30s turned up at a hospital, east of Tokyo, having overdosed with the painkiller Tylenol, Dr. Grant Mikasa turned for help to his personal digital assistant, or PDA. When he found that the prescribed antidote wasn't available in Japan, he had to find another medicine that could be used for the same purpose. "I had the information in my pocket so I was able to retrieve it really quickly," he says.

PDAs have moved beyond e-mail, addresses and appointments. They've become tools that help save lives. Increasingly, doctors are using them to retrieve medical information on the spot about how to treat an illness or disease and administer the right medication, the correct dose, check for side effects and the way that drug interacts with other medicines.

In the United States, one in four doctors uses a PDA. Forrester Research, a U.S.-based market-research firm, forecasts that sales of hand-held devices and applications used by doctors in the U.S. alone will triple to $181.4 million this year from $60.1 million in 2002. And doctors in Asia are catching on. Companies like U.S.-based Skyscape put medical information into a PDA-friendly format. About 30,000 of Skyscape's 170,000 customers live in Asia -- from Taiwan, Singapore, China, and Japan to Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines.

Skyscape's software is designed to cross-reference material from different medical texts. So if a doctor wanted to look up the symptoms of an infectious disease, for example, he could then access the list of drugs used to treat it. Skyscape founder and chief executive Sandeep Shah, launched the company in 1993. Shah, whose wife is a physician, realized that doctors seeing patients in different hospital wards, or on calls, needed access to medical texts that they couldn't carry on their rounds. PDAs offered the perfect solution to Shah, a graduate in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay. First, they are small and nonintrusive so that doctors can be talking with a patient at the same time as they are tapping on their hand-helds.

And they're fast. "The benchmark for our technology is to be able to retrieve information within five seconds," he says. "Doctors don't have the luxury of spending too much time fumbling with a tool."

What's more, the need to be constantly updated on medicine is an imperative for all doctors. "Even an experienced doctor in practice for 10 or 20 years has to be aware of the changing landscape," he adds, noting that medical-textbook publishing has become a $3 billion-4 billion industry, and new books are being published or updated every year.

So far Skyscape has converted more than 264 medical reference texts for PDA use. Among some of the more popular titles: The 5-minute Toxicology Consult, which is designed for doctors who treat poisoned patients, and the Physicians' Desk Reference, which allows doctors to search for drugs by brand or generic name and provides information on drug interactions, warnings, precautions and dosing. All titles can be bought and downloaded from the company web site: www.skyscape.com.

Doctors in Asia give Skyscape high marks. Ng Yih Yng, a doctor with the Singapore military, who is currently participating in a United Nations peacekeeping mission in East Timor, recalls using his PDA when he had to treat a child suffering from acute renal failure.

"We had to figure out the doses of medication and it would have taken a lot more time to verify the dosages on the Internet," he explains. "You usually can get your answer within a half a minute using the PDA -- whereas it might take five or 10 minutes on the Internet."