Sunday, August 06, 2006

Travel Nurse + PDA?
What do the words travel nurse and PDA have in common? They are both full of potential and portable. Whether you are talking about a Palm or a Pocket PC these small portable handheld computers have the ability to become a nurse's best friend. Or at least a fantastic resource. :)
Some examples of the resources you load onto your PDA include a complete medical dictionary, lab values, hemodynamic assessment tool, pulmonary assessment tool, ABG calculators, dosage calculators, PDR or Drug References and more. Of course, many of these resources are priced comparably to thier hard copy counter parts. But, did you know that there are many of these that are no cost? That's free to you and me! www.skyscape.com has a really cool program called archimedes which can calculate 70 medical formulas which is completely free. You can also find some programs at www.rnpalm.com or www.studentdoc.com .
It can take some digging to find the really useful free stuff but if you are on a budget and don't want to spend literally a couple thousand dollars putting every neat must have program on your PDA then you need to seriously consider doing the research and finding the freebies. :)
Some examples of what you can do with a PDA include using it to track tasks, meds and even charting notes. On a personal level you can use it to keep track of people including friends and supervisors, listen to music or watch movies and even check your e-mail. You can load map programs or use mapquest mobile and even use it as portable road atlas.
Jesse

3 comments:

48ernurse said...

Don't forget about reading books! As a travel nurse, and a book lover, I can't always carry all of the paper books that I want to. I can carry my Palm and the 40+ books that I've downloaded on a card the size of a postage stamp.

May I sugest peanutpress.com and fictionwise.com as 2 good sites to look at for decent e-books?

Bladewarior said...

Two free programs that I find very usefulo are Epocrates which is a drug formulary, and diagnosaurus which is a symptom/ diagnosis matcher. Both are free at their websites.

Anonymous said...

Kudos! Very informative article, keep up the good works! More power