Medical tablet PCs and point-of-care terminals erected on nursing carts have come along as two popular items in the mobile medical care solution. While most people are strangers to the term, mobile medical care services have already pervaded our life, including ambulances, and the medi-mobiles that circulate in remote areas. But what are the prerequisites any of these devices must have to help meet the needs of front-line clinicians. And when these mobile medical devices are equipped with the right hardware and software, what are the benefits expected to come. This writing is devoted to giving answers to these two questions. 

<B>Meeting the Needs of Front-line Clinicians</B>

Caregivers need technology solutions that help them address the 'five rights'throughout the continuum of patient care. This means making sure that the right patient gets the right medication at the right time, in the right dose and via the right route ¡X from the time a doctor's order is created to the time that order is satisfied at the patient's bedside.

Mobile hardware and software products within the hospital include mobile facilities taken along on doctors' inspection rounds and nurses' checkup routines. Most of the hospitals in Taiwan opted for PDAs when they started installing mobile systems within the premises, but the drawbacks of commercially-purposed PDAs were soon exposed: they were too small, and too difficult to operate. The size of the screen severely limited the view of data. Also, the PDAs were RISC-structured, making operation, software design, design revision, and maintenance all difficult. Therefore, PDAs don't fully satisfy the healthcare community's need to enhance patient safety and improve clinician workloads.

After the PDAs were eliminated, hospitals turned to notebook computers that were a size larger. Yet in the end these computers were deemed unsuitable for mobile medical purposes because they couldn't withstand the constant jolts when placed atop moving carts, and the jolts caused hard-drive breakdowns. Also, rushed nursing workers tended to spill drugs and other liquids on the computers, and disasters ensued, unfortunately impeding treatment operations.

Hospitals realized that mobile medical care devices, whether they are take-along tablet PCs or panel PCs erected atop the carts, required more than just buying ready-made IT facilities and uploading medical program applications. Different specifications and designs were necessary depending on the hospital and nature of the assignments.

<B>The Prerequisites of Mobile Point-of-care Solutions</B>

Experts have identified 10 requirements for medical tablet PCs and point-of-care terminals erected on nursing carts to be successfully adopted by hospitals.
1. They have to be rugged and resistant to drops and jolts since they are moved from room to room.
2. The casing can be wiped clean with disinfectant to reduce the spread of germs as nurses and physicians move among patients.
3. They must be approved according to EN60601-1 and UL2601-1 standards. This certifies that there is no interference with medical equipment that can pose a health risk for patients.
4. The systems have to be low-noise to minimize discomfort for the patients.
5. The tools must be designed for low power consumption to lengthen battery life. The tools must last through an entire shift (8 hours, but typically more), which is made possible by enabling the user to switch to a new battery pack without shutting the unit down.
6. The tools must have wireless connection to a server for access to updated patients' medical information and to document a patient's condition instantly.
7. They must be easy to use. The tools cannot add more steps or time to the care delivery process because caregivers are already overburdened.
8. They must be built to the most common industry interface and software standards so that the system can run almost any health care application.
9. The tools must integrate a patient identification system such as a barcode scanner and a radio frequency identification (RFID) scanner for matching each patient with the treatment being delivered. Nurses can use RFID scanning to identify patients unobtrusively, as well as to verify themselves as the authorized caregivers.
10. It's necessary that the paraphernalia and soft- and hardware all come with a long lifespan, and dependable suppliers have to be relied on for consistent component replacement and maintenance services.

Tools that fail any of these points will likely end up on a shelf gathering dust.

<B>The Benefits of Mobile Point-of-care Solutions</B>

According to an Intel study, mobile point-of-care solutions offer a better way to address the needs of healthcare professionals in clinical settings. Mobile point-of-care solutions can improve the quality of care by providing up-to-date information when and where it is needed. Extending secure access to medical records and patient data in emergency rooms, satellite clinics and ambulances, as well as at the typical hospital room bedside, will likely translate to fewer errors and delays, faster turnarounds, and an overall improvement in patient safety.

Technologies such as wireless networking and specially designed mobile PC solutions can extend the reach of healthcare information systems by making a consolidated view of a patient's clinical data securely available to authorized care providers ¡X enabling more informed and immediate decisions at the point where care is delivered.

According to the same Intel study, the advantages quickly become evident. In clinical settings where mobile point-of-care solutions have been put in place, nurses and physicians find that there is less margin for error, plus their documentation workload is reduced. With immediate access to accurate, up-to-date medical information, clinicians can spend less time chasing paper and duplicating efforts, and spend more time with patients. The bottom line: patients get better care.

Studies conducted by Intel's Digital Health Group show that deploying a combination of electronic medical records (EMR) and mobile point-of-care technologies can yield workflow optimization improvements with clear benefits for patients. For example, a wireless network and mobile point-of-care system helped Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, achieve a time saving of 18 minutes per day per clinician in terms of faster decisions and access to resources. Meanwhile, at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif., a pilot implementation of a mobile point-of-care solution contributed to a thirty percent (30%) reduction in medication errors.