Pediatric PDA Blog

The National Guideline Clearinghouse [www.guideline.gov] an initiative by the AHRQ is the largest and most trusted collection of evidence based clinical guidelines that we can ever have.

Fortunately we can download these guidelines one by one to our handhelds whether its the Palm, Windows Mobile, or even the iPhone.

The video above demonstrates the steps on how to download these .pdb files on Windows Mobile and view it using any .pdb reader like Mobipocket or iSilo [the above example].

All you have to do is to visit the website www.guidline.gov on the windows mobile using Internet Explorer Mobile and then choosing the guidline that you want, then navigating down to Palm download link and saving the file to your handled local directory [in this example I saved the file to a folder that previously created in the storage card and named it iSilo] and that document can then be opened via iSilo. Of course similarly these documents can also be downloaded via the desktop and then can copied to mobile directory.

It’s a good idea to rename these downloaded files [as shown above] into something that makes sense because there original names are only numerical which will make it difficult for us to find files later when the list grow.

For Palm; the same process applies and is even easier as the Palm reader itself can read .pdb files.

In the case of the iPhone; we have to first download these files using the desktop then we can download them into the iPhone iSilo from the desktop [read this post for details].

Here’s how it looks like on the iPhone:

The website also offers these same guidelines in Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF file formats both of which can be viewed on Palm and Windows Mobile but not as easy and as readable as the .pdb files.

Unfortunately this is not so easy to download each and every guideline that we want to refer to on the bedside, and we wish that in there near future the NGC will come up with some kind of a reader or at least a more mobile friendly website to makes it easier for us.

Tags: iSilo

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 6:27 pm and is filed under All, Evidence Based Pediatrics, General Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.