Collecting observational data using a handheld personal digital assistant.

摘要

Context and setting At our institution, paediatric inpatient ward rounds are held in a conference room away from direct patient care areas. These rounds, which provide a forum for reviewing new admissions and discussing the ongoing care of each patient, serve as one of the main ward-based educational activities. We wanted to conduct an observational study to learn how various factors affect housestaff perceptions of the utility of this activity for patient care, education and team administration. Why the idea was necessary Most existing observational studies of inpatient rounds have used video-or audio-recording devices to capture observations. These methods provide very rich datasets, but can be quite disruptive and require significant time and resources for data transcription and coding. Although pencil-and-paper coding schemes are less disruptive and resource-intensive, they also provide a more limited dataset. In the hope of obtaining a relatively rich dataset without the disruption and cost of direct recording, we developed a novel system to collect and code observational data using a handheld personal digital assistant (PDA).