Office-Based Patient Interview

Data Collection Outcomes Comparing Paper Forms With PDA Forms in an Office-Based Patient Survey
by James M. Galliher, Thomas V. Stewart, Paramod K. Pathak, James J. Werner, L. Miriam Dickinson, and John M. Hickner
Annals of Family Medicine, March 2008; 6: 154 - 160.

In this project, a nurse or medical assistant from each of 22 medical practices interviewed 60 patients, 30 with a paper form and 30 with a PDA. Data was collected between August 2002 and September 2003 and interviewer training was conducted with individual phone meetings. The project used Sony Clie PDA’s running Palm OS and used Pendragon Forms to program the survey. It appears the PDA survey used skip patterns, had some manadatory responses and did data validation on the responses.

The authors reported that the technical difficulties with using PDA’s for this application made it so that they would prefer to use tablet computers or mobile phones in the future.

The original plan was to transmit the data as it was collected from the medical practices to the Pendragon Secure Server. Unfortunately the communication was blocked by firewalls and the PDA’s were instead sent by mail to complete the data collection. It appears that the secure comminication provided by Pendragon Software is a proprietary format over TCP/IP.

The return rate was better for paper that for the PDA’s (94% vs. 82%), but this doesn’t take into staffing issues and thefts. Of the 570 expect returned forms the the response rate was 537 for paper and 466 for PDA’s. Two of the PDA’s were stolen and for both paper and PDA there were some staffing issues that effected the return rate. It appears that for the 15 of 19 sites that didn’t have stolen PDA’s or staffing issues, that there were still more returned paper forms than electronic forms (446 vs. 430) which is only a 3.7% difference.

The error rate was better for PDA’s than for paper (3% vs. 35%). This difference was mostly because of the significantly lower rate of omissions on the PDA because of the designated mandatory responses.

This study didn’t compare the time involved in the administration of the surveys by the research team, but they did report that the staff spent many hours navigating computer security issues and with assisting with the setup of the PDA’s.