While on rounds in the Advanced Care Cardiac Unit, each doctor at Sacred Heart Medical Center is flanked by a charge nurse with a Tungsten C handheld. Instead of flipping through paper-based charts and lab reports, or opening a new application on a hallway laptop to view patient records, the charge nurse carries a Tungsten C handheld and has access to lab results, vital signs, medication lists, and patient histories for all patients checked into the 30-bed unit.

At Indiana-based St. Mary's Health System, physicians use Tungsten C handhelds with software from MercuryMD, ePocrates and MICROMEDEX. As a result , the doctors can get access to patient information, such as lab results, medications, vital signs, EKG reports, and other data elements.

"It's amazing what our physicians can do at the bedside when the critical information they need is in their hands," said Scott Krodel, director of management information systems, St. Mary's Health System.

Finally, the department of emergency medicine at the Detroit Medical Center and Wayne State University uses Tungsten C handhelds to provide physicians with tools and access to reference information. Currently, efforts are underway to evaluate software tools to access patient data using the Tungsten C and the hospital Wi-Fi network. The department also provides Tungsten C handhelds to residents and attending physicians in order to better manage their residency program and accreditation requirements.

In addition, emergency physicians use a Tungsten C with medical applications such as ePocrates' clinical suite, 5 Minute Clinical Consult powered by Skyscape, Washington Manual powered by Skyscape, and MedCalc. These physicians can connect to medical references and the existing hospital Wi-Fi infrastructure to access data they need.

About the Tungsten C

First made available in April, the WiFi-enabled Tungsten C includes 64MB of RAM and a 400MHz CPU. It is aimed at campus-based professionals who are away from their desk most of the day but need access to all the information on their PC. The handheld also has a bright 320 x 320 transflective TFT display that supports 65,000 colors.

It features an internal rechargeable 1500mAh battery that provides a full work day of consistent WiFi connectivity, or a full work week of normal handheld use. The Tungsten C runs Palm OS 5.21, which is the first Palm operating system to feature Graffiti 2 based on CIC's Jot application.