eClinician Project has distributed seven hundred public health-friendly, wireless enabled Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to primary care clinicians working in New York City, federally funded, Community Health Centers (CHCs) which serve minority underserved communities that suffer a disproportionate burden of chronic disease and lack access to health promotion disease prevention services. Clinicians have received a hands-on, on-site orientation to PDAs. Ongoing training has continued via online webcasts (see www.CDNetwork.org). Clinical decision-support tools are available for download via the eClinician project web portal (see www.eClinician.org). Each participating health center also received a wireless router to create an onsite internet hot spot to enable clinicians to have internet access. Health alerts can be delivered automatically to the PDAs of the clinicians.
The goals of the eClinician Project are to: 1) Increase awareness and encourage adoption of information technology among providers in Community Health Centers by providing PDAs as first line strategy towards achieving this goal, 2) enhance access to information on emergency preparedness, 3) improve patient outcomes by providing PDA-based clinical decision-support tools 4) encourage chronic care management and health promotion/disease prevention activities, and 5) increase productivity and efficiency. Pre and post training surveys, in addition to a case study, have been used to evaluate the population demographics, adoption of PDAs by the clinicians, clinician attitudes towards using PDAs, influence of PDAs on clinical-decision making and barriers to adoption of PDAs and information technology in general.