Patient Keeper

[RipDogger]

Any of you out there have any experience with patient keeper or any similar patient tracking programs out there,

and if so what programs would you recommend if not PK?

[StPhun]

I've dabbled with it a bit, and at one of our hospitals the Medicine residents use it. They HATE it because data entry is time-consuming and cumbersome without a desktop-windows interface, even despite the portable keyboards. And I've found that our surgical service turnover is too fast to spend so much time entering data.

However, at our institution the attendings have corporate PK which automatically syncs their patient data, for billing purposes, to their palms. The only data entry they have to do is click on the service provided, because their patient lists are maintained for them, by ??? the billing dept.

There is a competitors product (Patient Tracker?) which apparently does have a desktop interface (?$$$), but IMHO in order for PK to work for a residency program it must have both a desktop interface for supplemental data entry, but more importantly the patient lists should be maintained automatically. For example a patient is triaged in the ER and the triage nurse enters the bare basic H&P into "the system" and then automically gets tracked and added to the proper lists. Centralization is the key.

I think this is an very important issue because in these times of work hours limits and cross-covering patients you barely know, having any additional patient data "in the palm of your hand" at 4am provides for better continuity of care and increased efficiency. A win-win situation.

And how awesome would it be to order labs from your palm, and then have the results e-mailed to your palm (apparently they have a working proof of concept of this at Colombia-Presby for PPC).

Anyway, the alternative to these proprietary systems are to make your own using something like HandBase, for example.
!!!!!!