It is well known that many medical facilities seek to stay on top of recent technological advancements - and it's no different when it comes to educational aids.
For the School of Medicine at Kansas University, teachers and researchers were seeking new ways to deliver improvements in the ways that its 700 students were able to store and access confidential patient histories.
The old method of requesting physical paper files from the records department had quickly become inefficient with the growth of the facility.
Initial efforts to ease information friction resulted in the automation of records-keeping activities, with dedicated desktop portals and print-out services being used to share the privileged information.
However, the growing number of students and patients meant that the fixed access points would sometimes become overrun with medical students and supervising staff members seeking important files.
Added to this, the cost of printing out physical copies of patient histories was quickly ballooning out of manageable proportions.
Departments began making use of pagers and personal digital assistants to help them organise details more effectively - but these devices were unable to connect directly to the central database that managed the majority of medical information.
With the introduction of improved wireless communications, new channels soon became available to the school.
To leverage these advances, IT executives and department heads agreed that the distribution of smartphones in combination with dedicated software development would provide the most cost-effective solution.
The handsets allow staff members to access priority information stored by the teaching hospital through either wireless or mobile networks - increasing the speed with which the students and supervisors could make informed medical decisions.
Web application development allowed the hospital to install dedicated programs that lets staff members make use of dedicated drug interaction databases and clinical logging services in addition to the speedy recovery of patient histories.
Advanced sharing programs mean that users are able to transfer documents directly through wireless connection - meaning that they no longer have to rely on physical printed copies.
With these improvements on the way that help students and teachers interact with the hospital's content management systems - as well as each other - the medical teaching facility was able to generate real and lasting changes by reducing frictions in information access and improving efficiency in the way that data is shared.