Physician mobile, wireless tech use jumps

Driven by a desire to move seamlessly across the clinical environment, doctors are leapfrogging over WiFi-enabled laptops and PC-synched PDAs into the next generation of wireless connectivity. Rather than lugging around a laptop or last-gen PDA, physicians are buying Swiss Army Knife-style smartphones with cellular, WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities. And they're not just surfing the Web and reading email. In some cases they're even retrieving medical images, using them when seconds count and they're not close geographically to a given hospital. As cellular bandwidth increases, thanks to EVDO adoption by wireless carriers, reading images is growing more practical. Not only that, vendors are developing mobile VPN technology allowing physicians to maintain secure communications as they jump from one network to another.

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