By: Felasfa Wodajo, MD

One of the most enjoyable aspects of orthopedic surgery is the role of physical examination in diagnosis. The patient may tell you their knee (or hip, shoulder, etc) hurts "sometimes", and if you’re lucky, they might tell you under what conditions. Your job is figure out which of that joint’s particular ligaments, labrum or tendon is injured.

Luckily, for almost every musculoskeletal ailment, there is a specific physical maneuver to discover the underlying problem. Often, there are several maneuvers for each problem. And, therein lies the problem: How do you remember the specifics of each maneuver, its indications, and the positive and negative findings when its been months or more since the last time you used the maneuver?

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Hey everyone. First, we wanted to apologize for the lack of rapid updates to the site. Usually we like to get 3 to 4 reviews up per week. Unfortunately, we’ve both been extremely busy with our schedules and unable to post as frequently as we’d like to. Thankfully our guest contributors to the site have done an excellent job on providing some great material.

However, our schedules are clearing up in the next few days, so there will be a lot of activity on this site over the next few weeks. We’ve got a bunch of apps waiting to be reviewed, so look out. Some of the new things to look for:

1) A new top 10 medical apps list. Our current list has gotten outdated.

2) Two different top 5 medical app lists, one for free apps, and the other for paid apps.

3) Categories of Medical Apps. We’ll start dividing our reviews into specific categories, such as Imaging Apps, Anatomy Apps, etc.

4) We’ve done this before, but we’ll integrate more healthcare apps into the site. Such as our "Healthcare App for your patients" column we tried out some time ago.

5) We’re planning on doing a major face lift to the site in the next month or so. We’ve outgrown our current format and want to provide a cleaner interface.

We’d also like to thank everyone for supporting and visiting the site. We’ve been taken aback from the number of hits we get, our traffic over the last few months has substantially increased and we look forward to improving the site for everyone. Again, if you’d like to be a guest contributor please refer to this post. If you have some suggestions, always feel free to email us or continue on to leave us a comment on this post. Remember to follow us on twitter as well.

-iMedical Apps Team

Quest Diagnositics announced today that computer users of their Care360 ePrescibing program can now use the iPhone and iPod touch to prescribe medications and look at lab results for their patients. They are also offering a six month risk free trial to healthcare providers. The app is called Care360 Physician Portal.

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Clinical trials for cancer and other diseases are vital to test new therapies and improving existing ones. The treatment of cancer, in particular, depends greatly on discovering the optimal combination and timing of chemotherapy agents. Progress in these finer details can be slow and grinding, yet very important to patients, both in improving survival and in avoiding unnecessary toxic treatments.

Given the often surprising abundance of available clinical trials for each disease, finding the optimal one for your patient can be challenging. Each trial is aimed at one or a few diseases and each has its own specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. For physicians and patients searching for a clinical trial, the NIH website clinicaltrials.gov has been a godsend. Without it, there would be no practical way of finding every possible trial. Yet, the website currently currently more than 78,000 trials.

Therefore, providing convenient access to this information and simplifying the searching and categorizing of the information would be of great benefit for patients and physicians.  In this review I’ll discuss how this iPhone medical app, Clinical Trials, aims to do just that. It succeeds in the former but unfortunately fails to do the latter.

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As medical technology improves, common sense dictates it will become more innovative and sometimes even cheaper. Medical applications on a portable device are not new, remember the old school Palm PDA? It was a must have for physicians and medical students. Just the other day I saw an attending pull out one of those old bricks. Other than the platform, the biggest difference between those Palm medical apps and the iPhone medical apps are the developers. The barrier of entry into making an iPhone medical app is significantly less than it was back in the day. Anyone can make an iPhone medical app (learn some programming, or pay someone) and submit it to the App store. This has both positives and negatives, as documented on this site.

Anyways, before I digress further, this influx of new developers has lead to innovation, and significantly cheaper applications. In order to embrace these applications, insurers are going to have to change their archaic ways, and at the end of the day, it’ll help out their bottom line. So, that leads us to the title of this post, why are Medicare and other insurance companies refusing to pay $150 for text-to-speech software, yet willing to pay $8,000 for a device that does pretty much the same?

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