Medical Reference In The Palm Of Your HandMedical Reference In The Palm Of Your Hand

As doctors make diagnoses and treatment decisions for their patients, they often need to thumb through bulky medical reference books and make complex calculations. Now, an integrated suite of decision-support resources from Skyscape Inc. allows physicians to access clinical reference information electronically and make computations at the patient bedside using their PDAs.

Skyscape's new Clinical Constellation Suite provides doctors with mobile access to a collection of popular medical reference material and tools, including information about drugs, diseases, lab tests, treatment options, and guidelines.

The suite includes Griffith's 5-Minute Clinical Consult, 2004 Pocket Book Of Infectious Disease Therapy, The AHFS Dosing Companion, Bakerman's ABC's Of Interpretive Laboratory Data, The Medical Letter's Handbook Of Adverse Drug Interactions, The Guide To Popular Natural Products, the ICD-9-CM classification codes used by U.S. hospitals for diagnoses and procedures, and the Archimedes medical calculator, which contains 70 of the most common medical formulas. Also included is ARTbeat, a tool to allow doctors to access regularly updated information from sources such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Clinical Constellation features Skyscape's Smartlink technology, which allows a doctor to move from a reference selection in one source to related references in other material with a few clicks of a PDA, says Dr. Darrick Nelson, an associate professor and physician who is using the software at Christus Spohn Memorial Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Without this feature, if a physician were looking for information about heart attacks and drug treatments for specific or unusual heart patients, like a pregnant woman, "you'd need to go from one reference book, close it up, and then look up the same references in another book," Nelson says. Meanwhile, the Archimedes calculator feature allows quick computations of problems such as determining a patient's electrolyte balance or ideal body weight based on height.

"This provides the equivalent of information from nine significant sources and books and keeps doctors from having to lug them around," Nelson says.

The Clinical Constellation Suite can be downloaded or installed onto memory cards and runs on Palm and Pocket PC PDAs, a Skyscape spokeswoman says. The suite is priced at about $140.