The University of Louisville is giving PDA's with medical references from Skyscape to more than 900 students and instructors.

According to the University of Louisville, a steering committee consisting of representatives from the Schools of Medicine, Nursing, Dentistry and Public Health and Information Sciences made the decision to use PDAs loaded with software and applications to support the classroom learning and clinical work of health sciences students.

The School of Medicine and the School of Dentistry have distributed the PDAs with Skyscape references. The university's School of Nursing may begin providing some of its graduate students with PDAs in the next school year. The university is also a participant in Skyscape's smARTrain program--a special group program Skyscrape claims is designed to meet the needs of residents, medical students, nursing students, pharmacy students and physician assistant students.

"It made sense to offer our health sciences students PDAs to support their learning. The devices are mobile, affordable and highly functional--especially when loaded with efficient, helpful references, such as those we purchased from Skyscape," said Ruth Greenberg, senior administrator for educational affairs at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. "Rather than carrying around lots of heavy books, our students can just access the answers they need by reaching into their pockets. And with Skyscape's smARTlink feature, they can toggle between diagnosis information and drug data--that is really helpful for someone who is still learning and may not have all the answers in her head."

With Skyscape's smARTlink technology, the company said students and instructors can easily cross-index between clinical and drug prescription products or dictionaries, such as the two powered by Skyscape references published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins currently used by the health sciences students at the University of Louisville: 5MCC/2003, the handheld version of Griffith's 5-Minute Clinical Consult 2003; and StedmansC, the PDA version of Stedman's Concise Medical Dictionary, 4th Edition.