Mobilizing a health professional's workstation - results of an evaluation study

To evaluate the idea of a multifunctional mobile pen computer to support in formation processing tasks of health care professionals we carried out a fi eld study. On a tablet-sized mobile pen computer we set up a health profess ional workstation, MEDIAS/WIN, with most of the application systems that ar e presently used by health professionals at Heidelberg University Medical C enter. Our experiences during the study, involving 11 physicians, nine nurs es and four computer scientists showed that it's not enough to make existin g applications mobile-most user interfaces have to be adapted for pen input . The presented system served as a valuable basis for study purposes but wa s not suitable for use in clinical routine. Patient data of the current cli nical case and medical knowledge in the form of reference lists were found to be most important for mobile usage. Desirable functionality also include d mobile access to electronic mail, electronic ordering of meals and some d ocumentation tasks, e.g. the documentation of diagnoses and orders for diag nostic and therapy. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reser ved.