Improvement in quality of care by mobile access to always-up-to-date clinical guidelines and documentation of the decision process

All staff members and residents at the Department of Cardiology are provided with a Palm Tungsten-T personal digital assistant (PDA). All departmental clinical guidelines, which are based on international (ESC) and national guidelines, are available on the PDA. The guidelines are created with Frontpage and iSiloX, and are stored in iSilo format. In addition to the guidelines, medical calculators and medication subscription software are available on the PDA. Primary risk-prediction software, developed earlier in our department, is also available. To make sure that information on the PDA is always up-to-date, the devices can be synchronized wirelessly via Bluetooth LAN access points. The ability to have up-to-date clinical information on an easy to use PDA directly at the point-of-care allows consistent diagnosis and treatment of all cardiology patients according to the latest guidelines, thereby vastly improving the quality of care.