Web-based PDA downloads for clinical practice guidelines and decision support tools

The extraordinary volume of health-related information made available on the Internet comes at a high cost for effectively storing and accessing clinical information resources. Additionally, the ability to use critical patient care information is limited to the availability of computer access. Physicians and other health care professionals have readily adopted personal digital assistants (PDAs), also known as handheld computers, because the devices provide succinct critical patient care information at the point of need. Clinical practice guidelines available through the Internet for use with PDAs present health professionals, who have little time, with powerful information already formatted for point-of-care devices. This paper will review several strategies for finding and accessing point-of-care clinical information.