Feasibility of a palmtop-based interactive education to promote patient safety.

Institute of Medicine defines “patient safety” as a set of measures taken by healthcare professionals to prevent adverse outcomes from medical errors. Kohn1 estimated that medical errors are likely to result in a death of 44,000 to 98,000 people in U.S. hospitals each year, making it almost the fifth leading cause of death. The costs of medical errors, made by healthcare professionals, amount to $29 billions annually. Recent studies showed that current system of medical training and continuous education has limited capability in promoting and sustaining awareness of patient safety and medical error issues. Use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) has been increasingly widespread among clinical students and residents. Despite significant improvement in PDA functionality, current literature does not provide systematic assessment of potential use of hand-held computing for interactive clinician education. To address these issues, we assessed the feasibility of a PDA -based interactive multimedia tool aimed to provide self-paced patient safety education for clinicians.