Archive for October, 2009
USMLE Buzz Flash Cards App Aims to Help You With USMLE Step 1 Studying [App Review]
One of the biggest surprises in the App Store is the lack of legitimate USMLE study resources. I thought one of the biggest markets in would be medical education. There are a good number of Q-banks available for USMLE studying, but most can’t be accessed on the iPhone. Can you imagine if Kaplan or USMLE World had an app with their Q-banks? I would think this wouldn’t be hard to implement, and I know many people who would jump at the chance to have their personal Q-banks mobile.
Right now the four main players in the App Store are First Aid Q&A series, Lange Q bank, Dr. Conrad’s Disease Deck, and USMLE Wiz Flash Cards. We’ve reviewed the Lange Q bank(step 2 version) and Dr. Conrad’s Disease Deck. These apps will cost you 33 dollars and 20 dollars, respectively. But now you have the USMLE Buzz App crashing this sparse party. The app usually costs $2.99, but is currently on sale for 99 cents. It’s significantly cheaper than the other Q-banks and offers a different type of question answer format. This review will cover the features of USMLE Buzz along with the best way to use it for USMLE step studying.
MD on Call App Hopes to Make Your Call Nights Less Painful [App Review]
Its 3 AM and you are the new intern on call covering far more than your share of patients for multiple services. Your pager goes off. Mrs. Smith is seizing and Mr. Jones is vomiting large amounts of blood and is hypokalemic. What do you do?
MD on Call ($5.99) hopes to provide these answers. The app is developed by MDMarkee Publishing and is a new addition to the App Store. It is a simple application with sometimes basic but vital information, especially useful at those early morning call hours. This review will focus on the information provided and my experience using this application while being on call.
New Swine Flu App Released, Made by Harvard Medical School
There has been a flurry of H1N1 applications, and they are all a bit hard to differentiate. There is a notable app that was recently released. The app, HMSMobile Swine Flu Center, was developed by Harvard Medical School and costs $1.99. This is the first Swine Flu App in the App Store with a big-time medical name behind it. The app itself has built in videos explaining H1N1 and other related topics. It also has the "outbreaks near me" feature that most of the swine flu applications have. Of note, the app has a "business add on" feature, that provides advice to businesses on how to prepare for outbreaks in the workplace.
There is a nice video of the application on the Harvard website that can be found here:
The iTunes link to the application can be found here.
Diagnose a Heart Murmur with a Stethoscope? There’s an App for that…in the Future?
This past week Reuters reported on how Zargis Medical(auscultation software) was cleared as a developer for iPhone apps and more importantly, peripherals for the iPhone.
The following is a quote from Zargis Medical in the article:
The future of healthcare delivery is about connectivity and mobility. Zargis’ expertise in computer-aided auscultation and our advanced medical software platform positions us perfectly to create diagnostic software and peripherals that are a natural fit for smartphones. We intend to improve healthcare efficiency by helping clinicians bring medical technology to the patient, rather than the other way around,” stated Zargis CEO John Kallassy.
If you delve deeper into Zargis Medical, you see how they are heavily vested in diagnostic cardiology software. They have created the worlds first FDA-cleared medial software to identify and classify suspected systolic and diastolic heart murmurs. Of particular interest is how they have integrated their software with the Littmann Bluetooth Electronic Stethoscope Model 3200. In their setup, the stethoscope communicates via bluetooth to a laptop with the Zargis auscultation software.
Continue on for the rest of the story.
Pocket Heart App: More Than Just a Good Looking Medical App [App Review]
Get yourself a copy of Pocket Heart (iTunes price is $5.99) and you’ll immediately be impressed by this app. Yes, the graphics and animations will be what first grabs your attention, but you’ll soon find out in this review that Pocket Heart is truly a good learning tool for cardiac anatomy and physiology.
Procedures Consult – Musculoskeletal App Superbly Demonstrates Common Bedside Orthopedic Techniques [App Review]
If one wanted to get an idea of the potential of the iPhone as a tool for bedside medical and surgical education, this application by Modality and Elsevier would be a good starting place to get inspired. While it seems obvious that a portable device with a great user interface, a sophisticated operating system and great multimedia features should be a shoe-in for portable medical education, what is equally true is that the critical ingredient remains great instructional content.
“Procedures Consult: Internal Medicine – Musculoskeletal” brings together a highly detailed review of orthopedic bedside procedures, such as aspiration of small and large joints, splint application and reduction of joint dislocations, with a well crafted user interface to create an application that will genuinely be useful for emergency room physicians and junior orthopedic residents. This review will cover how this medical application for the iPhone and iPod Touch goes about teaching these procedures.
App Giveaway, USMLE Buzz Flashcards
The developer of USMLE Buzz Flash Cards App, Andrew Yu, has graciously given us some promo codes to distribute to our readers. We’re in the process of reviewing this application, but so far we really like it. These flashcards are quick hitting facts that are high yield and useful for Step 1. I’d compare them to the quick hitting facts you’d find at the end of First Aid. I can’t emphasize how high yield these flash cards are. The app itself has over 3,000 flashcards.
Continue on if you’re interested in the free promo codes for the App. We’re giving them out on a first come, first serve basis.
Upcoming Medical App to Offer Extremely High Resolution Imaging in the Palm of Your Hand
MacVideo has an excellent article on an imaging technology that is in the works for the iPhone. It’s called ViSUS and being developed by the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, now a hotbed for mobile imagining applications. They’ve also developed the ImageVis3D Mobile app and the now famous AnatomyLab App.
This improvement in technology should benefit radiologists the most. We’ve reviewed other mobile radiology app viewers, such as OsiriX, but this app promises to offer extremely high resolution imaging by streaming images from a server. A piece from the MacVideo article:
The iPhone has a screen resolution of 480 x 320 pixels. According to the university, the best of today’s high-definition TV sets has an image resolution of 1,080 x 1,920 pixels. But ViSUS can handle an image resolution of 200,000 by 200,000 pixels.
Streaming the images to the iPhone will let users see an entire image, at lower resolution, or zoom in to look at parts of the image, at higher resolution. The university says ViSUS handles the images faster, with less processing power, than other software, such as Google Earth.
Having this imaging quality in the palm of your hand will be tremendous for radiologists on the go.
The Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah has a pretty interesting website as well. I’m eagerly awaiting to see the future medical imaging apps they will roll out with. Also, their ImageVis3D mobile app is free and fun to use, so make sure to check it out.
Procedures – Subclavian Line App Helps Teach You Key Procedure [App Review]
Procedure apps appear to be all the rage lately in the mobile medical world, and rightfully so. These instructional apps are a valuable resource to those learning how to do procedures in the health care world. We reviewed another Procedures app recently, Procedures Consult-Internal Medicine, that covers a wide variety of procedures. However, this app focuses on one specific procedure, and is a fraction of the cost.
Procedures – Subclavian Line, is a $2.99 app produced by MeisterMed. You might remember one of our previous reviews on a MeisterMed app, PediDoser. We weren’t huge fans of that app (although to their credit, PediDoser has a 3.5 star rating in the App Store). Nonetheless, once I tried out this current app for this review I was definitely impressed.
