Background During the past year, a report on the use of personal digital assistants (PDA), also known as hand held devices, indicated widespread acceptance of their use in family practice 2, pharmacology3, and other specialties. Our informal observations of University of Virginia house staff suggest variable PDA usage. Some clinical departnents have strongly encouraged the use of PDAs whereas other departments have taken a more cautious approach. PDA medical user support seminars, workshops, and email lists have been created further demonstrating the popularity of PDAs in clinical areas. At this time, there has been no formal evaluation of how PDAs are used at our institution. This poster contains our initial evaluation of how residents in various medical specialties currently use PDAs and what they perceive as their future needs.

Methodology Our initial survey, a web based form with eight questions, was designed to be filled out in 1-2 minutes; we developed. These questions included:(1) current medical specialty (surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, etc),(2) frequency of PDA usage (3) type of PDA used, and (4) current and projected PDA tools used. We targeted residency programs at the University of Virginia known to have significant usage of PDAs as well as programs that appeared to be resistant to PDA usage. For each program, we contacted either the chief resident or the resident director who then sent out an email tp. their residents with the URL of our survey. A single follow-up email to the residents was sent to encourage residents to respond.