Medical Texting
The Ectopic Brain blogs about Health Service Needs More SMS. Just yesterday a colleague of mine emailed me for help as he is experiencing issues with his Palm T5 and his t630 phone, being unable to retrieve SMSes from the phone. This just goes to show you how dependent we have become on SMSes. The telcos are very happy too for over here and I’m sure all over the world where “texting” is done, they are making $$$$$$$$$.
What I like about SMSes is that the messages are unobtrusive. They don’t disturb you in the middle of a conversation or worse still in the middle of a procedure like a phone call. They are also usually cheaper then a voice call and the best part is the data is kept on your phone so you can retrieve the information later.
What I don’t like is smtms d msg cn b cryptc n diff 2 undrstnd. No fear, you can always refer to SMS Dicitonaries if you are befuddled by the SMS shorthand.
I use it everyday and I am very impressed with the Treo650′s SMS program as the “threaded conversation” display is very user friendly. I am trying to persuade my colleague to go convergence too and he won’t have anymore problems with getting the correct phone drivers.
A sample message I sent yesterday:
Me2DrL: Got a patient Mr X in Rm 123 for a PICC. Can you help?
DrL2Me: Sure. Can put it in this afternoon
Later in the day DrL SMSed “PICC in successfully”
I do communicate with patients via SMS too and in fact if you don’t want to be disturbed by phone calls from patients, you could insist they send SMSs only (cellphones are pretty ubiquitous these days anyway). You could use software for your Treo like Ringo or CallFilter to screen calls from individuals or contact groups (e.g. Patients) and divert the calls to a voice message which tells them to send an SMS instead!
There is a cheaper way to communicate via text with your smartphone but I’ll leave that for another blogpost….
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About the author, Alan: Alan Teh is a Malaysian Physician who specialises in Hematology-Oncology & Stem cell Transplantation. He has been using Palm PDAs since 1997 and is absolutely reliant on them. His current PDA is a Palm Pre and is a strong advocate of the webOS platform, Palm's latest operating system. Caught the blogging bug in 2004 and has been addicted ever since… |
