In the past, I have written about medical reference software for PDAs and other mobile devices, from companies such as Skyscape, ePocrates, and Thomson (Mobile PDR). The comprehensive list of integrated medical titles from Skyscape, while not the least expensive of the group, has been my favorite. These programs are essential to my practice, and they assist doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals with portable information at our fingertips. They eliminate the need to lug around a stack of heavy books; however, as with textbooks, the information is not always up to date.
With the increasing pace of the discovery of new treatments, of approvals of new drugs, of new warnings of drug interactions, and of recalls by the FDA (5,025 products in 2002), it is essential that the information which we use to treat and manage patients not be static. The Pocket PC is a good solution for that, but today, content is primarily the domain of medical school reference books.
Daily, I am inundated with medical information from disparate sources such as the Web, journals and newsletters, as well as peer-reviewed content, drug notifications, and FDA or CDC alerts. This typically comes in the form of paper newsletters which are piled up on my desk, or Web stories that are hard to keep straight.
Information at my fingertips
Skyscape has a new program called ARTbeat. It is a free, constantly updated, intelligent mobile solutions platform for medical practitioners, hospitals, and medical enterprises. It is a dynamic program that includes newsletters and alerts, as well as reference works, to ensure that I have the most current and comprehensive information I need at my fingertips. It also enables hospitals to integrate non-clinical content, such as guidelines and formularies, with the tools doctors use when making decisions.
Having access to this current information is more important than many doctors and other healthcare practitioners realize. Research has shown that the ability to capture and retrieve accurate information at the point of care can decrease the time it takes for delivering care by half and can significantly reduce prescription and other errors. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has noted that insufficient or erroneous point-of-care treatment information is a frequent and significant cause of medical errors. Preventable in-patient drug mistakes alone cost the American economy more than $2 billion and 80,000 lives annually!
How does it work?
Skyscape's ARTbeat platform is excellent in its simplicity. Once downloaded to the Pocket PC, it updates new information (through ActiveSync), keeping me as current as my last sync. (Note: users must have a live Internet connection to keep updated.) Furthermore, Skyscape provides smARTlink, which automatically cross-indexes information from a variety of independent sources and topics.
As an example, if there is an FDA newsflash on a specific cancer treatment, I don't have to review all alerts to find it—a link to it will automatically appear when I am reviewing the cancer information and smARTlink to ARTbeat. No other product I have reviewed provides this functionality. This enables medical professionals to practice at a higher level of expertise and immediately have the information required to make the most informed decisions.
This is a different and better approach than simply pushing a newsletter onto the PDA. While doctors can subscribe to e-mail updates, we are not going to remember which newsletter from four or five months ago contained the information we need. With ARTbeat, we don't have to remember—it is brought to us.
ARTbeat includes a variety of free information sources such as MedWatch, CDC Spotlights, and the Connections channel. In addition, users can subscribe to a number of premium channels including Drug News Weekly and DrugLink on an annual basis. Skyscape states that in the future it will add the highest quality sources of medical information as additional channels through ARTbeat. The initial ARTbeat channels are:
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