Free medical applications for the iPhone are being released on a daily basis, but not all of them are useful. This isn’t a surprise since they are after all free to download. However, there are definitely some free medical applications worth downloading.
This will be a regular column on iMedicalApps.com, where we will periodically post commentary on recently released free medical apps that are actually useful from a physician, medical student, or any other healthcare providers’ perspective.
In this post I’ll focus on three free medical applications related to the following: clinical trials, Framingham scale, and a radiology teaching app.
STAT Framingham Heart Age
We all know how the Framingham scale is a crucial tool for primary care physicians when trying to calculate morbidity and mortality of cardiovascular risk factors for patients. Although there are other medical calculator apps that provide this for free as well, such as MedCalc, this app is simple to use and does the job quicker. You’ll see advertisements on the second page of this app, but it doesn’t hinder the functionality at all. This app is quick as well, enabling you to show patients how much of an effect certain risk factors have while you’re sitting next to them.
Drug Trials
I’ll go ahead and say this medical app is a must download if you use clinicaltrials.gov to pull information about drug trials for your patients. This app actually deserves a more full review, one we’ll try to get out soon. It’s packed with features such as eligibility criteria, e-mail out functionality, and even pulling up google maps on your phone to show the location of the trial! We’ve reviewed another similar type of app awhile back, Clinical Trials, and when it comes to searching for drug trials, this app is just as good or slightly better. Unlike Clinical Trials($7.99) though, this one is free.
MSK Radiology Teaching File – LITE
This is the lite version of Radiopaedia.org’s Radiology Teaching Files: Volume 3, an app designed to teach radiology. Although this is a lite version, I was surprised to find out how much information it packs, 10 full cases. This lite version comes included with some relatively common pathologies and even though its free, you could definitely get some good learning accomplished if you’re a resident or a medical student. There are other LITE versions of Radiopaedia.org’s content, and each of these files contains 10 cases also. Usually I wouldn’t include a LITE version of an application in this list of free medical apps, but this app had plenty of content.
Note: At the time of this post these applications were free, this can obviously change over time. If you’ve got some free medical apps you love to use, make sure to comment and let the community know.
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Thanks for the review. All 3 volumes (brain, abdomen and msk) will be coming out as version 2 in January. We will be adding a few cases to the lite versions of volume 1 & 2 and hopefully 10 extra cases to the full version. These will be free updates to those of you who have already downloaded the apps.
We would dearly like to make all the apps free, however we too need to pay the bills so that we can continue to develop these apps and our website, Radiopaedia.org. You can think of purchasing the app as a small donation toward building a remakable resource.
Yours truly
Frank
Just thought I would let you know that Version 2 of all Radiopaedia.org Radiology Teaching Files is now available as a free update.
Additionally, Volume 4 : Paediatrics has also been released.
You can find them all at the iTunes Appstore by searching for Radiopaedia.
More information is available at : http://radiopaedia.org/article…
Cheers, Frank
Frank Gaillard
Editor, Radiopaedia.org
Our two hospitalist practices are using Concentrica for secure clinical communication with referring physicians.
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My partner and I head two hospitalists groups in the Boston area, one acute care, the other a rehab hospital. For years our handoff communications went through paper mail or fax. We were very diligent about communication. Even so, specialist from acute care settings and primary care physicians in the community complained that our group was like a black box – that they were not getting good communication about the care we were providing. The hospital even setup a physician portal so that any on-staff doctor could log in remotely and access their patient’s information. But this “pull” model never caught on, as most doctors expect data to be “pushed” out to them.
One of our new physicians suggested we look at Concentrica, which is an online network for secure clinical communication. This is free to physicians to communicate with each other. The national directory of physicians meant that we could quickly send to any physician, without having to know their fax or email. Like an online email system, recipients can reply and forward messages, so now we could get immediate feedback from colleagues in other locations, and in important cases, have a real dialog about patient care. The “Group Discussions” feature allows the specialist in town, the hospitalist, and the PCP to all join in an online dialog about one patient.
The application works well on our smartphones.
When our group wanted to send documents on our behalf, we upgraded to the subscription version, which cost less than paying someone in our office to fax the documents. There is an audit trail so we can see who received their messages. One feature we really liked was that if the message was not accessed online it was faxed, so we knew our clinical work was getting there.
For our group it made it easy to communicate with other physicians, to get our documents out, gave a way for others to respond, and was cost effective.
Arthur Williams, MD