The challenge of identifying and absorbing relevant medical literature will not abate anytime soon and the proliferation of services that purport to simplify or eliminate this problem for physicians is itself now becoming a distraction. The rapid adoption of web-enabled smart phones by physicians, such as the iPhone, is driving this dilemma from the theoretical realm directly to the bedside. The hope is that if relevant medical literature is immediately available at the point of care, physicians would be more inclined to use it.

At the same time, the mantra of practicing medicine that is evidence-based is ringing ever louder. Thus far, it seems to this reviewer that most physicians apply it most strenuously when criticizing other physicians’ decisions rather than applying it to their own practice. Nevertheless, large well-respected compilations like the Cochrane Abstracts are available and widely used.  They offer well constructed summaries of evidence-based diagnostic and treatment guidelines for thousands of pathologies.  It is into this nexus that the “Evidence Central” app enters.  This review will cover the features of this recently released medical application, which is technically “free” in the App Store, but requires a paid subscription of $79.95 in order to actually use.

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FDA Drugs is an iPhone application that functions as a mobile drug database. The user selects a drug and the application exposes brand and generic equivalent drug information, with the added twist of being able to display the actual FDA approval document.

The name is unfortunate as it implies that the application was developed by the FDA, which it is not. Rather, the developers draw on publicly available FDA data stores to display the label information for thousands of FDA approved prescription and over-the-counter drugs. When the label information is not stored inside the application, it displays a NIH website (“Daily Med”) where the user can search for FDA label information.

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Current Clinical Strategies Publishing recently sent us some free promo codes for this app, ECG Interpreter(you may have noticed) and we were thrilled by the last app we reviewed by them, ACLS Advisor.  So then naturally, we had high expectations for this medical app.  ECG Interpreter is relatively inexpensive at $1.99(current price), but with so many ECG apps out there we wanted to know if this app was on par with similar applications and if it met our high expectations.

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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.

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The developer for ECG Interpreter gave us 10 promo codes to give our to our readers.  We plan on having a review of this app up on Monday, but in the meantime we’d like to hear what you think.  If you use a promo code make sure to leave a comment letting others know which one you used, and let us know how the app works for you.  This app actually attempts to give you a reading for an ECG based on variables you input, which is different than the other ECG apps we’ve reviewed.

Continue on for the codes:

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