Archive for August, 2009
OsiriX Medical App Puts a Small DICOM Workstation in Your Pocket [App Review]
One problem that has plagued physicians in specialties where imaging is important is how to describe a patient’s imaging findings to a colleague. Certainly, the radiologist’s report is helpful but sometimes it’s not enough. Particularly for surgeons and interventional radiologists, imaging findings are like a road map to a procedure. If you’ve ever given driving directions to an out of towner, you’ve seen the look of confusion overcoming their face as you desperately pile on landmarks hoping they don’t get lost. But, if you are a physician, how do you communicate the subtleties of abnormal anatomy without pictures? This review will discuss how this application helps put a legitimate image viewer in the palm of your hand via the iPhone Operating System.
Guest Contributors to the Medical App Review Site
Our goal is to provide a site that allows the medical community an information hub to medical applications that are actually beneficial in practice. If you’d like to contribute to this goal and submit a review of a medical or healthcare application to this site, email us. We welcome nurses, PAs, physicians, medical students, and anyone else in the healthcare field to write a review. A prerequisite to reviewing an app is you can’t have any affiliations with the developers of the application, we strive to maintain an objective site.
-iMedical Apps Team
mVisum, Helping Interventional Cardiologists Relax
There’s a nice article from the San Francisco Chronicle about the medical app mVisum, and how it was developed. The app is actually a product of the VA. It was originally made for the blackberry, but recently has been available for the iPhone. The article doesn’t mention the iPhone compatibility though.
Dr. Shroff and her team at DCVAMC launched mVisum in January 2009. mVisum helps cardiologists remotely diagnosis heart-attack-types and quickly communicate with relevant people who are working to help the patient. mVisum can vastly decrease the time it takes to get patients into appropriate treatment by making high-quality–and secure–EKG readings available to cardiologists on their smartphones. This way, they don’t necessary need to be inside the hospital. In the past, DCVAMC staff had to first locate–and occasionally wake up–off-site "interventional cardiologists" and then determine the quickest and most efficient way to distribute EKGs for diagnoses.
I couldn’t help but think of the interventional cardiologists who wouldn’t be rushing to the hospital as fast if they read a NSTEMI vs a STEMI. At the same time, the goal is to get this technology in all ambulances so the EKG will go directly to the cardiologist, and that ever important cath lab can get ready sooner.
App Giveaway: We’re giving away 3 copies of the Joslin Chest Atlas App($14.99) to our readers
Courtesy of Dr. Joslin, we’ll be giving away 3 promotional codes (free copies) of his newly updated Joslin Chest Atlas Medical App to the first 30 people to participate in the giveaway (usual price is $14.99). We just reviewed this innovative app in our prior post, and we’re definitely fans of the medical app. The App’s purpose is to help healthcare providers improve their ability to read chest x-rays. It can be used by healthcare providers of all types, and it’s especially useful if you’re currently training (residents, students, etc) or have just started practicing yourself. Our extensive review of the app can be found here. The app can be found in the iTunes App Store here. To participate in the giveaway there are a few simple steps to follow:
1) Post a comment on our review of the Joslin Chest Atlas or any of the previous posts on this site.
2) Send us an email with a copy of your comment.
3) We’ll pick 3 different winners at random and email each of them a promo code for the application.
4) The giveaway will end after the first 30 people participate or until August 31st, at 11:59PM ET. (so your odds of winning are pretty high)
Joslin Chest Atlas App Helps You Learn Your Chest Films [App Review]
Joslin Chest Atlas (v2.5), made by IdiogenicOsmoles, and costing $14.99, was just updated. This medical app aims to help healthcare providers improve their ability to read chest x-rays.
Learning how to read chest x-rays is one of the most essential tasks you learn in your clinical years. If you’re in the wards late at night and your patient is decompensating, often one of the first tests you order is a plain chest film. In these acute settings, you don’t have time to wait for a radiologist to read your results. That’s one of the reasons why having the ability to properly read a chest film is essential if you’re a healthcare provider.
In this review I’ll go through the features this app provides and explain how it can be used as a learning tool.
PediDoser App Helps You Prescribe Pediatric Drugs [App Review]
PediDoser, developed by MeisterMed and priced at $2.99 (“limited time only”), claims to be a fast and easy-to-use pediatric medication dosing tool. Since I was about to begin my outpatient peds rotation, I was really excited the new version (1.2) became available and figured I’d give the app a good run for its money. Currently, it’s ranked 17th in the top paid Medical apps category. I’m a bit surprised by this ranking, as you’ll see in the following review.
New Blue Light Therapy App a Bit Shady. Does App Store Approval Process Need to Take This Into Account?
A new healthcare app just released on the market claims to treat seasonal depression, called BluWave. Dr. Grohol has an entertaining read about how this app is a bit dubious. He gives great clinical research data, and how the makers use shady research to market this device. The app claims to use
"Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology to deliver blue light adjustable in specific Nanometers (nm). Blue light therapy has been clinically proven to combat seasonal affective disorder (SAD), depression, fatigue and general body clock issues".
I’m not too interested in this therapy, but I thought the way the company backs up their claims was interesting.
How the iPhone has paved the way for a quicker transition by the Healthcare industry to an Apple OS Tablet
Rumors of an Apple tablet have been all over the place during the past few weeks. Although Apple is notorious for pulling off clandestine product launches, the consensus appears to be that Apple will launch a tablet early next year. With the $19 billion dollars from the stimulus package set aside exclusively for electronic medical records, it would make business sense for Apple to venture into making tablets that can be used for electronic medical records. So then hypothetically, if we get an Apple tablet in 2010, will it really be used by the healthcare world? Everyone seems to be talking about how great an Apple tablet would be for the medical community, but few are talking about if it would actually be used.
MedAbbreviations App is now free, for a limited time only [App Review]
Everyone who enters the healthcare world knows how abbreviations can be the bane to your existence. You spend an inordinate amount of time searching Wiki and google trying to find what appear to be random letters strung together. At one point I was using a law firms site (god forbid) to help me with abbreviations.
After a few short weeks you get the hang of the abbreviations and those random letters become second nature. MedAbbreviations would have definitely made my life easier during that initial period. Plus, I wouldn’t have felt dirty from using a law firms catalog for medical abbreviations. In this post I’ll review MedAbbreviations (v1.2) and mention some of the other medical abbreviation apps for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
