Unbound Medicine has released the lasted version of The 5-Minute Pediatric Consult, a mobile reference based on content from medical publisher Lippincott Williams & Wilkins that provides advice about problems seen in infants, children, and adolescents at the point-of-care.

The developer says more than 450 diseases are covered by The 5-Minute Pediatric Consult, and clinicians can choose from multiple indexes to navigate to the information that best answers their questions. They start with the basics by choosing a symptom, then move on to review differential diagnosis, treatment options, follow-up care and more.

Search the medication index by specific drug names, use the surgical glossary to review procedures, or find diagnostic tests for children with heart conditions in the cardiology laboratory. Other features include a Chief Complaints section addressing the workup and treatment of 50 signs and symptoms, plus an ICD-9 code index and more than 100 tables.

The latest version includes additional material about different types of poisonings and illnesses in addition to a lot of revised content.

Unbound delivers regular updates for 12 months when you sync your device, in addition to support for wireless synchronization, landscape and high resolution displays, Secure Digital and Memory Stick expansion, and data compression.

Handhelds = Safety
The National Academy of Science - Institute of Medicine estimates mistakes cost the healthcare system more than $2 billion annually, with over $100 million coming from preventable drug errors alone. Treatment prescribed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services includes increased use of information technology, such as handhelds, as among the most cost effective ways to improve patient care and reduce medical errors.

A survey of 1,600 physicians by Skyscape in 2004 corroborated these findings. Questioned doctors said PDAs reduce errors by more than 4 percent, with 92 percent of them asserting handhelds improve efficiency. Among internists, 24 percent indicated they reduce their medical errors by over 10 percent, while an additional 41 percent achieved a lesser, but still impressive, 6 percent reduction.

Another survey, this one of emergency room physicians by insurer MedAmerica Mutual told a similar story. 65 percent of respondents said PDAs helped them avoid a dosing error, 58 percent a dosing frequency error, 25 percent a drug error, 24 percent a therapeutic error, and 18 percent other types of errors.

66 percent of respondents used their PDA to look up information and perform medical calculations on every shift, with an additional 15 percent using their devices on more than half of their shifts. When asked to describe how the devices was used in their clinical practice, 93 percent said as a drug reference, 56 percent a medical calculator, and 38 percent a medical reference.