A Brilliant Boss, a Top-Notch Doc, and a Co-Worker who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos

Good evening! Tonight's tale is about a brilliant boss, a top-notch doc,
and a co-worker who could sell ice cubes to eskimos.

Take a look at this wonderful presentation by the Shifted Librarian at Suburban Library
System on
Extending Your Online Services. Thanks for mentioning Handheld Librarian as a sample blog!

Mark Rosenbloom, an Emergency physician who formed PEPID, has an article about him in the
March 4 Chicago Tribune,
Software May put PDAs on the Critical List.

Today, I had a wonderful experience job-shadowing a doctor in our hospital and his use
of his pda in emergency care. When I heard about this idea from my boss, Carol Galganski,
I thought it was excellent. This was further proven after the great experience I had today.
Carol is the ultimate medical librarian, having a bachelor's in nursing, and a master's not only
in library science, but health administration also! She thought that this experience would help
me to share practical clinical application with others new to pdas. How true, how true!
A couple weeks ago, I told you about my experience with meeting this emergency physician
in the library with his pda and talking extensively to him about his use of the pda. Today, I
got to spend some time "job shadowing" him in minor emergency care. While I was there,
he had four cases. He consulted his pda on a drug cost, a drug dosage, or for 2 of the 4 cases.
Now, I can honestly say I have seen a pda in action at the point of care. What a valuable
experience it was. This top-notch emergency doc says that he uses his pda more in the
main emergency room, and that I could shadow him there sometime in April. For those of you
working with pdas that have not done this, I highly suggest you do so!

This emergency doctor also shared the fact that in his experience the most valuable pda resources
for him in ED included Epocrates for drug interactions, costs, and facts; the Emergency Medicine
Companion Handbook; PEPID-ED, and QID. This is especially valuable if you/we wish to recommend
resources to others, and if we were to get a site license, what resources we would want to get.
This MD also told me that as he was investigating software for procedure logs, schedules, etc. with
the changes in Avantgo, that he discovered a website Eresidency.
Eresidency combines the scheduling, numbers, etc. that many hospitals have websites for and depend
on Avantgo to publish to the handheld. Eresidency also has the procedure logging features that resident
programs would like to have their residents use on a handheld.

This doctor also more than validated the value of a medical library to the clinician in many more ways than
one. This doctor just published an article in "Annals of Emergency Medicine." There were numerous references
in the article which he got by doing research in the online tools the library offers. He visits the library
to retrieve articles the library does not have in electronic format. He works with the medical
residents and journal club and refers the residents to the library to learn how to use it, to do Medline searches
and to retrieve the journal articles. This doctor also happens to be working on a Master's degree in Public Health
and so uses the library for projects related to his college work. What a stroke of luck that I happened to
speak to him in the library that day! What a gold mine of information, collaboration, and validation of the value
of a medical library!

I have another co-worker named Carol, who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos! Today two nurses
came to talk to me about pdas after they had initially talked to her. She had sold them on the
use of pdas for the clinician, and by the time they came to me, they were so excited they could
not wait to get their pdas! Great job, Carol!

If any of you get the chance to job-shadow, please share! When I get to do it again, I will share too.
Also as you hear from clinicians what pda tools they use the most, let me know and I will post
it here! Thanks!