PDA Use by Clinicians has a Positive Impact on Clinical Decision Making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A review of:
 
 Dee, Cheryl R., Marilyn Teolis, and Andrew D. Todd. “Physicians’ use of the personal digital assistant (PDA) in clinical decision making.” Journal of the Medical Library Association 93.4 (October 2005): 480-6.
 
 Objective – To examine how frequently attending physicians and physicians in training (medical students, interns and residents) used PDAs for patient care and to explore physicians’ perceptions of the impact of PDA use on several aspects of clinical care.
 
 Design – User study via a questionnaire.
 
 Setting – Teaching hospitals in Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania in the United States.
 
 Subjects – A convenience sample of fifty-nine attending physicians and forty-nine physicians in training (108 total), spread unevenly across the five states. 
 
 Methods – Subjects were recruited by librarians at teaching hospitals to answer a questionnaire which was distributed and collected at medical meetings, as well as by email, mail, and fax. The subjects were required to have and use a PDA, but prior training on PDA use was not a requirement, nor was it offered to the subjects before the study. Most of the questions required the respondent to choose from five Likert scale answers regarding frequency of PDA use: almost always, often, a few times, rarely, or never. In the reporting of results, the options ‘almost always’ and ‘often’ were combined and reported as ‘frequent’, and the options ‘a few times’ and ‘rarely’, were combined and reported as ‘occasional’. Subjects could also record comments for each question, but only for affirmative responses.
 
 Subjects were asked about their frequency of PDA use before, during, or after a patient encounter. They were also asked if PDA use had influenced one or more of five aspects of clinical care – decision making, diagnosis, treatment, test ordering, and in-patient hospital length of stay.
 
 Data analysis included chi square tests to assess differences between attending physicians and physicians in training regarding frequency of PDA use and the influence of PDA use on the five aspects of clinical care. The subject population was also divided into frequent and occasional users of PDAs, and chi square testing was used to assess differences between these two groups regarding the influence of PDA use on clinical care. A significance value of P
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.203 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".