The PDA Revolution in Healthcare
 
Sir William Osler, a great clinician was of firm belief that a medical trainee requires convenient access to authoritative information to aid them in their learning process. He said: " The student begins with the patient, continues with the patient, and ends his studies with the patient, using books and lectures as tools, as means to an end ". What he so eloquently said has always remained true and the only thing that could be added to this one hundred year old statement would be 'using books and lectures and PDA as tools, as means to an end'.

For the past two decades, healthcare informatics has gone through a long and slow gestational period of development and evolution. The learning curve at times has been very painful and expensive; however for the past five years there are now encouraging signs of its acceptance by the medical fraternity and at the same time the development platforms have shown the much required flexibility among various interfaces to talk to one another. These evolutionary developments have been rapid in the last five years and we are now noticing changes in the way healthcare professionals learn, exchange and store information. These changes will surely in time to come have a beneficial effect on the patient care and make healthcare systems more efficient. The overall benefit of these changes will only be apparent when we are able to effectively show that the use of information technology has actually brought down the healthcare costs and decreased the number of errors that takes place. Those who accept and change will greatly benefit and those who do not will slowly perish and fade away. The clinicians who are reluctant to learn must learn to accept the changes and slowly learn to adapt to these. As Alvin Toffler put it - ' The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn '.