Archive for February, 2010
Five iPad Accessories for Health Care Professionals
It’s fair to say almost everyone has bought at least one accessory for their iPhone. My own collection consists of two items, a simple protective case, and protective case with a built in battery. I can’t emphasize how crucial my battery case has been, especially when I hit the 20th hour of a 30 hour on call shift and my iPhone’s native battery is about to die.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the development of iPad accessories, and how companies such as Griffin, Gelaskins, Sanho, and others are scrambling to manufacture products as fast as possible. Time is money in the accessory business, and the iPod/iPhone accessory business is big money — totaling 3.7 billion in 2009 alone.
Medical app developers have already mentioned how they will be customizing their products for the iPad. Epocrates and Macpractice are examples of two significant players who have already committed to the iPad platform — and there are more.
With that said, there’s no doubt some health care professionals will be using an iPad, whether for reading medical books or for EMR purposes. So then two key questions come to mind: What accessories do we want to see and whats already out there? The following are 5 key accessories:
iMedicalApps Will Cover HIMSS Conference in Atlanta Next Week
We are excited to announce that the iMedicalApps team will be covering HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia next week. HIMSS – Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society – is one of the premier healthcare IT organizations and there conference is a perennial highlight of the HIT community.
The iMedicalApps team will be covering the exhibition floor where vendors ranging from Epic Systems and MacPractice – both EMR vendors with iPhone/iPad interfaces – to Philips and Northrop Grunman, who bring an incredibly diverse array of healthcare IT services to the market.
In addition, we will be interviewing a number of executives from a variety of firms. We will bring you the latest news from the healthcare IT world, with a focus on innovations in applications for mobile platforms. If you have any particular vendors you’d like to know more about, please let us know and we’ll do our best to fit it in.
Epocrates Rx for Android gets reviewed – Our first Android medical app review
Health care professionals have been patiently waiting for the expansion of the Android universe to hit the world of medical apps. With the exception of Unbound Medicine – who have done a very nice job in rolling their products into the Android Market – users of Android mobile devices have thus far been relegated mostly to the world of medical calculators and dictionaries. For Android owners, the release of Epocrates could not have come sooner. If you are in the field of medicine, you are probably familiar with Epocrates. We reviewed Epocrates on the iPhone before. And for health care professionals and students, Epocrates, honestly, needs no introduction. From the short-white-coat student to the tech-savvy clinician, Epocrates has, for years, been an essential tool in refreshing those synapses you made in pharmacology class (or didn’t make). The field of pharmacology is ever changing. Epocrates helps many of us stay on top of it all, and improve care for patients.
Keep in mind, the version of Epocrates Rx currently available and reviewed here is still in BETA. So many of the richer features available on other platforms are still missing for Android. Also, one of the difficulties in reviewing any app for Android is the potential for variability in user experience between OS versions, and from phone to phone. This review is based on the HTC MyTouch, which runs on Android OS v1.6.
Need to Go to the Emergency Room? Let your iPhone Medical App Help Figure Out Which One
Emergency rooms are notorious for their long waiting times – that’s pretty common knowledge. But now the Hospitals of Central Connecticut are looking to a new medical app for the iPhone to help improve their emergency room wait times. Having spent a fair amount of time recently working in an emergency room, I (and probably everyone with similar experiences) can assure you that no one – physicians, nurses, administrators – want it to be that way. Much effort has been made in improving patient triage, workflow management, and other areas of opportunity that could increase the efficiency with which a patient is managed when they get to the emergency room. Some emergency rooms, like Hospital of Central Connecticut, are now looking to improve efficiency even before the patient arrives at the emergency room. The New Britain Herald reports that a new medical app released for the iPhone this week allows patients to view waiting times for the emergency rooms at two local hospitals in the hopes that patients with non-emergent complaints will head to the less crowded ER.
Connect Your Stethoscope to Your iPhone, Thinklabs’s Stethoscope Medical App – 3M/Zargis Not Far Behind
Whether diagnosing a heart defect in a newborn or discovering a life-threatening rumble in a elderly man’s abdomen, I think all clinicians can relate to that surge of excitement we feel when we discover something that we could use to help a patient. But as I’ve progressed through my training, I’ve also observed how these findings inevitably lead to confirmatory tests – echocardiograms, ultrasounds, and so on. Our clinical acumen is simply not good enough. I’ve often heard the argument that, for this reason, the stethoscope is an outdated tool. Perhaps it almost was. Companies like Thinklabs, however, feel very differently and are reinventing the stethoscope to meet the needs of modern medicine. Meet Thinklabs’ ds32a digital stethoscope with the Stethoscope Medical App for the iPhone. Together, they not only improve the clinician’s ability to hear sounds, but also to review and share the audio and waveforms – all on the iPhone.
Epocrates app now available for Android Smartphone – Medical professionals with Droid and Nexus One rejoice
Google’s smartphone operating system – Android – has been around for well over a year, yet the marketplace continues to lag behind Apple’s App Store with its meager collection of useful medical apps. The biggest player in mobile medical reference software is now changing this perception. Today Epocrates announced the availability of a free beta version, Epocrates Rx, for the Android platform, officially making it an android medical app. [We recently did a full review of Epocrates, including Epocrates Rx, for the iPhone].
This is exciting news for health care professionals who have Android phones – because their numbers are growing. Google recently announced 60,000 Android handsets are shipping each day, coming out to 5.4 million handsets per quarter. As a reference, Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter.
Interview with the Dr. Pieter Kubben, the Digital Neurosurgeon and iPhone Medical App Developer – From checklists to the future of EMR
It is a great pleasure to present this interview with Pieter Kubben, a Dutch neurosurgeon who is an impressive amalgam of clinician, researcher, and software engineer. He is currently in a neurosurgical residency while completing a PhD in intraoperative MRI-guided surgery for brain gliomas. As if this is not enough, as a “hobby” (his term), he also writes software, with a particular interest in computerized decision-support systems.
He has three iPhone applications currently in the App Store, including his newest one implementing the WHO surgical checklist(iTunes link). His other apps, Neuromind and SLIC, have been downloaded 8,000 times. Importantly, he is not just writing the software, but is also publishing his ideas in medical journals to spur changes in the way clinical decisions are made in the future. We encourage you to follow his blog at http://digitalneurosurgeon.com or on Twitter @DigNeurosurgeon. It is exciting to see a one individual with so many talents and to think about the great ideas yet to come from someone with such broad perspectives – we delve into some of those ideas in this interview.
Procedures – Hospital Collection App: 15 Procedures Taught With Extensive Multimedia [App Review and Comparison]
Learning a new skill can be an intimidating task for budding health care professionals – especially when it comes to learning medical procedures. There is a difference, any doctor will tell you, between reading about a procedure and actually doing it. Educators are beginning to take full advantage of new technology – like the iPhone/iPod – to help bridge the gap between comprehending and performing medical procedures.
Procedures – Hospital Collection is a new app that uses bulleted text, clinical images, and audio/video instruction to familiarize the learner with the preparation, relevant anatomy, and individual steps of common procedures in the hospital setting.
This app is not the first we have reviewed that offers instruction on performing routine hospital-based procedures. In many ways, Procedures – Hospital Collection is like the more expensive Procedures Consult – Internal Medicine App in its content.
So… how does it stack up to Procedures consult? In this post we’ll do a full review of Procedures – Hospital collection, and use the Procedure Consult series as comparison
Windows Phone 7 could challenge iPhone in medical arena and offer unique streamline functionality in healthcare
This week, Microsoft announced the end of Windows Mobile and introduced its successor, a completely redesigned platform called Windows Phone 7. While Microsoft’s creative energies don’t appear to have been expended on the new name, it may be because they were drained after redesigning just about everything else about their platform.
Even the more skeptical reviewers of Windows Phone 7 at least acknowledged the breadth of the overhaul of Microsoft’s mobile platform. Here at iMedicalApps, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the iPhone/iPad and the opportunities their unique user interface, ever expanding suite of medical apps, and other key features present for the medical world. One challenge we’ve frequently acknowledged, however, is that while many health care providers carry Apple in their pockets, Microsoft dominates the remainder of the healthcare world. And as more and more health systems look to adopt electronic medical records with mobile interfaces, Microsoft’s latest volley couldn’t have been at a more opportune moment.
