Mobile Devices And Software Aid In A Hospital's Clinical Research

Craig Hospital is a non-profit spinal cord and brain trauma rehabilitation and research hospital. Based in Denver Colorado, Craig Hospital has been treating brain and spinal cord trauma patients since 1956 and has treated over 25,500 patients.

Craig Hospital recently received a government grant to perform research on 8 different forms of rehabilitation in order to understand which techniques are most effective for each of the 8 disciplines. Craig Hospital teamed up with 5 other research hospitals (Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Shepherd Center, Mount Sinai, Carolinas Rehabilitation, and the National Rehabilitation Hospital) in order to make the findings representative of spinal cord injury rehabilitation practices nationwide. The data needed to be collected and sent to a main database at an outside location to be analyzed. ISIS/ICOR (International Severity Information Services/Institute for Clinical Outcomes Research) was the organization selected to perform the data analysis and to maintain the database to which all collected information was to be sent. The problem was that the hospitals were all in different geographic locations, as was the database collection point, and the patient care happened in a mobile working environment, which made the collection and secure synchronization of the research data to a central database a challenge.

MobileDataforce created a mobile handheld application for each of the 8 different types of rehabilitation. Each rehabilitator was given an HP iPAQ HX2190V PDA running Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system and asked to record rehabilitation progress with each of their patients in the study. There were approximately 250 mobile devices across the 6 hospitals.