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Once considered a toy for corporate techno whizzes or gadget-happy managers, PDAs are, in increasing numbers, becoming a daily business tool for front-line workers. And analysts project wide-scale adoption over the next two years.

Of course, passing out PDAs is simple and relatively inexpensive. The challenges of corporate deployment come in data integration, synchronization and security, says Bill Clark, a Gartner analyst. Companies that are vigilant over business processes will be best-positioned to reap the benefits of PDAs because they already have robust back-end systems into which these devices easily fit, he adds.

The transportation and financial services industries have led the way on PDA implementations, but manufacturing and healthcare also have seen their share of forward-looking applications, says Scott Lundstrom, an analyst at AMR Research.

Healthier data

The North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System (LIJ) in Great Neck, N.Y., is one example of a healthcare organization powering up with PDAs. About 300 physicians now use Palm PDAs to capture and track billing information as they make their rounds, rather than relying on the old method of writing out patient, procedure and diagnosis information on index cards. "The cards would filter in at the end of each day — if we were lucky," says Rick Carney, CIO at North Shore-LIJ, the nation’s third largest, nonprofit secular healthcare system. About 20% of the records simply vanished, "and a lot of what we did get was unreadable, which led to data-entry problems and delays in billing."

In November 2001, North Shore-LIJ ditched the cards in favor of Palm IIIs, which physicians pluck presynced from cradles as they enter the hospital. ChargeKeeper, an application from PatientKeeper, tracks patient visits, procedures and prescriptions. On the doctors’ way out, they put the Palms in their cradles, and the data is uploaded to an Oracle database.

For an investment that Carney characterizes as "several hundred thousand dollars — well under a million," North Shore-LIJ claims a 490% return on investment. The company enjoys cleaner, more complete data, which means less manual data entry and fewer invoices "bounced" by the billing system, Carney says. "We’re sending bills out faster, so we’re being paid faster," he adds.