Recorded presentation

Abu N.G.A. Khan, MD, MS and Steven Davidson, MD, MBA. Department of Emergency Medicine, Maimonides Medical Center, 965, $8th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11219, 718-283-6023, akhan@maimonidesmed.org

Objectives: To study the feasibility, effectiveness and convenience of conducting a medical survey using a PDA device for electronic data entry.

Method: An interactive Pocket PC 2003® PDA application was developed using Visual CE® to conduct a survey among the physicians in a community hospital regarding their interest and experience with different PDA applications. Data points also included the participant’s previous experience of taking a paper survey and their current experience of using the PDA for this survey. The software was programmed to track the time required to complete the questionnaire by each participant. Data was analyzed using SPSS® Ver. 12.0.

Results: About 85% (51/60) had prior experience of using a PDA. The mean time to complete the (14 question) questionnaire was 2.4 minutes (95%CI: 2.18-3.02 minutes). About 57% of the current PDA users and 67% of the non-users had pervious experience of filling up a paper survey questionnaire. About 65% of the participants rated their experience of using PDA for this survey as very convenient with a mean rating of 4.56 (95%CI: 4.37-4.75) on a scale of 1-5 (1=extremely difficult and 5=very convenient. Neither the time to complete the survey nor the rating was significantly influenced by the participants’ previous experience with PDAs (p=0.43).

Conclusions: Using a PDA for data collection may be a fast and effective alternative to traditional paper-based surveys. Direct data entry by the participants eliminates the cost, time and human errors in data entry, and enables tracking of users for longitudinal analysis.

Learning Objectives:

• A new tool for medical research data entry

Keywords: Technology, Research

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.

Recorded presentation