Capturing patient encounters during health care provider training using Personal Digital Assistants

Contemporary allied health education requires students experience both a depth and breadth of clinical encounters to prepare them to provide an increasingly broadening and evolving scope of practice. The Physician Assistant (PA) Studies program and the Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) Graduate Nursing Program at Wichita State University, College of Health Professions joined forces to undertake a project to introduce Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to their students. One aspect of this project was the logging method used by students. The PA program further studied the tracking and used three different logging methods with three different cohorts to capture patent encounter data during standard clinical rotations: paper logs, web-based logs and Using Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Results indicate that patient encounter data were significantly better using PDAs than the other two methods. This report presents the background and results of the project as well as lessons learned.