Medical PDA Forums
One of the inevitable aspects of using PDAs is that you’ll run into some problem sooner or later and apart from support and help from the manufacturer, another good way to get help is from a fellow PDA user.
If you are lucky enough to have a good friend who uses PDAs you could get personal help but do that too often and you might strain the friendship 
.
For instance, I get enough calls from hospital and the last thing I need is a phone call (especially at odd hours) asking for help in PDA matters!
A better way is to share the knowledge and experience online with other PDA users and online forums are an excellent way to achieve this.
I have revamped the links in the template on this webpage to useful Medical PDA forums which I am aware of. These are sub-forums and I don’t know of any specifically Medical PDA only forums but please email me if I missed out any.
* I have started a Medical/PDA Computing sub-forum in the MMR Forums. The MMR Forums are new and will hopefully grow over time and serve the local (Malaysian) medical community well, but everyone from the global village is invited to participate.
* DocsBoard is a US based Doctors discussion site and has an excellent Handheld section. I am also participating there and you can get plently of useful feedback from very experienced medical PDA users in that forum.
* Leo of MedPDA.net has linked the Technology (Computing/PDA) section of the Student Doctor Network Forums and this looks like a good place for medical students to visit and discuss PDAs and computers.
* Doctors’ Gadgets has a Medical PDA and EMR Forum – it doesn’t seem very active but hopefully this blog post will increase traffic there.
* Finally, there’s a Palmdoc’s Discussion Forum where I’ll be posting personal viewpoints and some other links. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you are most welcome to participate and ask questions or post comments there. I’ll do my best to answer your queries.
Online forums while being a good thing can be abused. Like anything else, if there are no rules and if anyone behaves as they wish, then it will be no better than a gutter free-for-all community. For this very reason, I have left a local forum and will no longer post or contribute there as long as there are members who don’t know how to behave or follow moderation.
For those new to the Internet, email or Forums, you should take sometime to read Netiquette 101 which spells out quite a few rules on decent online behaviour.
So go out there and join the forums but do respect their rules, post responsibly and do contribute to the global knowledgebase on PDAs.
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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… |
