Wireless technology may help doctors trea...( Wireless technology may put doctors who...),Health

Wireless technology may put doctors who don't rely on desktop computers and paper charts in a better position to treat their patients. That theory is being tested by students in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at the Mont Alto, York and University Park campuses where they are developing wireless technology for fast and secure transmission of patient information using hand-held devices.

Last spring, the IST students developed a mobile/wireless application prototype with a limited number of information fields. Using IBM's mobile database product, the prototype enabled communications between handheld devices and Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center's Acute Pain Management Database, developed by Patrick McQuillan, M.D., and Christine Gelnett, B.S.N, R.N., at the Medical Center's Department of Anesthesiology.

The two-way synchronization allowed for creation, updating and deletion of patient records from any location.

"It's virtual, and it's multi-processing--it can have several processes on at once," said Stan Aungst, assistant professor of information sciences and technology. "It allows physicians to query the database and have the answers they need."

The project began in the Department of Anesthesiology at the Medical Center as a way to log post-operative pain management data on patients who had had epidural anesthesia during surgery.

Nurses would accompany doctors to patients' bedsides, and with hand-held devices, record patients' answers to a series of questions about their comfort and pain. Then the nurse would have to take the information back to a desktop computer and download the information from the hand-held device into a desktop computer. Because the data transfer was unidirectional, medical staff would have to leave patients to query the database -- an inefficient use of time.

"The goal was to improve patient care by looking at how well people who had certain types of procedures d
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Contact: A'ndrea Elyse Messer
aem1@psu.edu
814-865-9481
Penn State
26-Aug-2003

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