PDAMD‘s Greg Jeansonne, MS IV has an opinion piece about why a lot more medical students and Doctors who should be carrying PDA’s are not. LinuxMedNews hasn’t made any 2001 predictions yet, so here’s the first one: that Linux based PDA’s will be a viable product this year and that it will hopefully fill the current void in open source PDA medical software. LMN’s own Captain Fantastic recently formed the OpenPMToolWorks project which may help at filling that void if it generalizes to PDA’s.

A significant platform for medical computing is the PalmPilot(tm) Personal Digital Assistant. It is probably the defacto standard among health-care workers judging by the depth of sites like PDAMD.com. Gregory E. Jeansonne, MS III has a review of patient tracking software for medical students and others. Ranging from $2250 (GregE says NO WAY!) to $5 with his choice coming in at $35. This range illustrates that software quality in medicine is frequently unrelated to price. An open-source patient tracking project for Palm(tm) would be something. However, the existence of a project like this is unknown to LinuxMedNews.