Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

368 personal information managercom has applied the same mechanism to allow patients toanonymously rate their doctors. (As with other user-providedreviews, however, one needs to be aware of the possibilitythat the reviews do not constitute a representativesample of consumer experience.) Patients can also personallyshare their experiences via a YouTube-like site calledICYou.com.Although social networking and content-sharing siteshave been most popular among the younger generation,the increasing adoption of these venues by older adultsand seniors is likely to fuel growth in online health-relatedservices in years to come, as is the continuing need to findcost-effective ways of serving growing patient populations.Further ReadingColliver, Victoria. “For These Startups, Patients Are a Virtue.”San Francisco Chronicle, October 1, 2007, p. C1. Availableonline. URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/01/BUDKSGAF4.DTL. Accessed November 5, 2007.Cullen, Rowena. Health Information on the Internet: A Study of Providers,Quality, and Users. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006.DailyStrength. Available online. URL: http://dailystrength.org/.Accessed November 5, 2007.Fox, Susannah. “E-Patients with a Disability or Chronic Disease.”Pew Internet & American Life Project, October 8, 2007.Available online. URL: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/EPatients_Chronic_Conditions_2007.pdf. Accessed November6, 2007.Lewis, Deborah, et al., eds. Consumer Health Informatics: InformingConsumers and Improving Health Care. New York: Springer,2005.Madden, Mary, and Susannah Fox. “Finding Answers Onlinein Sickness and in Health.” Pew Internet & American LifeProject. Available online. URL: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Health_Decisions_2006.pdf. Accessed November6, 2007.Mayo Clinic. Available online. URL: http://www.mayoclinic.com/.Accessed November 5, 2007.Organized Wisdom. Available online. URL: http://organizedwisdom.com/. Accessed November 5, 2007.RateMDs.com. Available online. URL: http://www.ratemds.com.Accessed November 5, 2007.WebMD. Available online. URL: http://www.webmd.com/. AccessedNovember 5, 2007.personal information manager (PIM)A considerable amount of the working time of most businesspeopleis taken up not by primary business tasks butin keeping track of contacts, phone conversations, notes,meetings, deadlines, and other information needed to planor coordinate activities. Software designers have respondedto this reality by creating software to help manage personalinformation.Early PC users improvised ways of using available softwareapplications for tracking their activities. For example,a spreadsheet with text fields might be used to recordand sort contacts and their associated information suchas phone numbers or data could be organized in tables inword processor documents. However, such improvisationscan be awkward to use. Loading a full-sized word processoror spreadsheet application takes time (and until Windowsand other multitasking solutions came along, only one programcould be run at a time). Further, it is hard to integrateinformation or keep track of the “big picture” with severaldifferent kinds of information stored in different formatswith different programs.What was needed was a single application that couldintegrate the personal information and make it accessiblewithout the user having to shut down the main applicationprogram. The first successful PIM was Borland Sidekick,first released in 1984. Although MS-DOS was designed torun only a single program at a time, it had an obscure featurethat allowed additional small programs to be loadedinto memory where they could be triggered using a keycombination. Taking advantage of this feature, Sidekickallowed someone while using, for example, a word processor,to pop up a note-taking window, an address book, calendar,telephone dialer, calculator, or other features. WhenMicrosoft Windows replaced DOS, it became possible torun more than one full-fledged application at a time. PIMscould then become full-fledged applications in their ownright, and offer additional features.As e-mail became more common on local networks inthe later 1980s and via the Internet in the 1990s, PIM featuresbegan to be integrated with e-mail programs suchas Microsoft Outlook and Netscape Navigator’s communicationsfacilities. New features included the automaticcreation of journal entries from various activities and thecreation of “rules” for recognizing and routing e-mail messageswith particular senders or subjects. A variety of freewareand shareware PIMs are available for users who wantan alternative to the commercial products, and a number ofPIMs are available for Macintosh and Linux-based systems.Web-based personal information management tools canmake it particularly easy to coordinate a widely scatteredworkforce, since each user merely has to access the servingWeb site. Recently, low-cost (or even free) Web-based applicationsthat include PIM as well as productivity featureshave been introduced—for example, Google Apps.The growth of handheld (or palm) computers (see PDA)and more sophisticated cell phones has created a need toprovide PIM features for these devices (see smartphone).Since the capacity of handheld devices is limited comparedto desktop PCs, there is also a need for software to alloweasy transfer of information between portable devices anddesktop PCs. This can be done with a serial, USB, or evenwireless connection.In the future, the PIM is likely to become an integratedsystem that operates on a variety of handheld and desktopdevices and seamlessly maintains all information regardlessof how it is received. There will also be greater abilityto give voice commands (such as to dial a person or to askfor information about a contact), and to have messages readaloud (see speech recognition and synthesis). The softwareis also likely to include sophisticated “agents” that canbe instructed to carry out such tasks as prioritizing messagesor returning routine calls (see software agent).Further ReadingBoyce, Jim, Beth Sheresh, and Doug Sheresh. Microsoft Outlook2007 Inside Out. Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Press, 2007.