The use of portable computer for information acquirement during anesthesiologist's ward round in acute pain service.

Background: The Acute Pain Service Information Management System (APSIMS), as we coined, is the utilization of a portable computer to register the data of the patients who need acute pain management during anesthesiologist's ward round. Initially, the data of the daily acute pain assessment at the ward are recorded on a sheet of paper by the rounding anesthesiologist, which are subsequently entered into the hospital main frame computer by an anesthetic nurse. In order to save manpower in data entry, we planned to introduce the personal digital assistant (PDA) into acute pain assessment. The anesthesiologist can record a patient's data directly into the PDA device at the bedside. After acute pain assessment is finished, we can directly up load the data from the PDA to the hospital mainframe computer without the need of further manpower for doing data input. This study was to evaluate the use of PDA for acute pain assessment and compare the PDA-based method with that of the current paper-transcription method in work efficiency.

Methods: Two computer applications were developed: the APS Mobile Assistant and the Data Transformation Wizard (DTW). The APS Mobile Assistant is a PDA application running on a portable computer with Windows Mobile 2003 operation system. The anesthesiologist can use this application to perform APS assessment at the bedside. The Data Transformation Wizard is a PC application which can transfer data from the PDA device to the hospital mainframe computer, by which the data in the PDA system can be integrated into the hospital information system. The evaluation included the reckoning of the timings of two periods i.e. the time spent by the physician to perform acute pain assessment at the bedside and the time required for data management by the nurse. To compare the paper-transcription method with the PDA-based technique, the Student's t test was performed to assess the data of time of each category collected. A P value less than 0.05 was considered to be significant.

Results: When the time required for assessment of acute pain was determined, no statistically significant difference was observed between the use of the paper-transcription-based system and the PDA system (P = 0.258). In comparison the PDA system was clearly shown to facilitate faster management of data (Paper-transcription method: 1.57 +/- 0.08 min per patient compared with PDA-based method: 0.24 +/- 0.01 min per patient, P < 0.0001).

Conclusions: Implementation of PDA device during APS assessment can provide the anesthesiologists with more time to acquire information during APS visits. Using the PDA technology in clinical settings can increase work efficiency. We can save manpower and are convinced that data collection is more complete with the use of a PDA system.