Abstract
In Taiwan, di tes has been top five cause of death since 1979, and even climbed to top four cause of death in 2002. Hence, di tes care management is important in maintaining and prompting public's health welfare as well as making full use of medical resource. In addition, relevant disease management strategies and researches also indicate its importance. Currently, although the mutual care module, promoted by Department of Health, has shown a good result, there is still lack of manpower support in di tes follow up care management. Therefore, it has become a dead space in di tes care that patients are unable to receive proper care outside medical facilities.As the development of technology, there is great benefit in the application of IT in medical care to the patient, medical personnel, even the whole society. The purpose of this study is to apply Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to develop a management system for diabetes care and evaluate its feasibility. The design of the system will emphasize the tracking and evaluating features and introduce the health care education into the system as well as a user-friendly interface to assist the medical staff in health care management.The study apply prototyping method to develop the program, which includes two stages: prototype development and the completion of system development. The development team members include the system developers and the sanitarian nurses responsible for diabetes care management. During the stage of system development, the involvement of the system end user in the analysis of the needs of the system, survey and system testing provides the direction of system design and modification, improves the usability of the system. By applying an in-depth interview with the system end user to evaluate their acceptance and suggestions regarding to the official version of the system. The subjects of the interview applies the perception of ease-to-use and the perception of usability in the technology acceptance module, developed by Davis(1989).The results of the study are as below:1.to develop an efficient information assistance system to help medical staffs to easily control the procedure of home visit and provide patient the best quality service in the shortest time. Its tracking and evaluating features can help the patient to receive follow up care after discharged from hospital.2.to use PDA to integrate all printed information and questionnaire; simplify the administration procedure; reduce the time for data input and errors, as well as help to use efficiently medical manpower and home-visit information.3.to provide the result evaluation for the practical application experience of PDA.