Response to Prakash, et al
| Autor: | Daniel D. Dressler, Sunil Kripalani, Anna Kho, Laura E. Henderson |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2006 |
| Předmět: |
medicine.medical_specialty
Medical education business.industry education Alternative medicine Intervention group Controlled studies Clinical decision support system law.invention Randomized controlled trial law Internal Medicine medicine Observational study Knowledge test business Letters to the Editor |
| Popis: | To the Editor:—We greatly appreciate the letter from Prakash and colleagues, which brings to light recent reports on the use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) in medical education published since the completion of the literature search for our systematic review.1 These reports confirm that PDAs remain useful to trainees in a variety of ways—e.g., in logging work hours2 and examination skills,3 and in learning about disease processes.4 Most of the reports cited by Prakash and colleagues were observational studies, while only 1 was a controlled trial. This underscores the continued lack of, and need for, more rigorously designed investigations. The controlled trial, by Grad et al.,5 warrants comment. It found no effect on knowledge test scores after first-year family medicine residents used a PDA-assisted evidence-based medicine (EBM) course. These findings differ from results of a randomized control trial by Leung et al.,6 which demonstrated that third-year medical students using PDAs with clinical decision support software increased their learning and application of EBM. Several factors may have led to these conflicting results, including differences in the study design and populations. In addition, more technical problems with the handheld device occurred in Grad's5 study, where 65% of the residents in the intervention group had technical problems with their handheld device on an average of 28.5 days over the 208 investigational days. The recent reports highlighted by Prakash are noteworthy. However, more rigorous controlled studies are still needed to examine how handheld devices impact medical learning and patient outcomes. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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