Enterprise digital assistants: the progression of wireless clinical computing.

By virtue of increasingly pervasive wireless connectivity, the proliferation of wireless handheld devices in clinical care is rapidly transforming the concept of the personal digital assistant (PDA) to the enterprise digital assistant (EDA). Wireless handheld devices are becoming extensions of the central hospital information system, in which it's understood that the health care enterprise, not the clinician carrying the information-dispensing device, owns the data. The practical implication for clinicians is that, despite the potential long-term benefits of seamless, just-in-time clinical data access, this paradigm shift portends decreased efficiency in the short term, as clinicians duplicate clinical data collection on private devices. Assuming eventual clinician acceptance, EDAs can form the basis of a national real-time clinical data acquisition system that ensures uniform prescribing, decision support, and diagnosis, and the means for tracking unusual disease presentation patterns that could be indicative of bioterrorism or natural disease outbreaks.