Updated! This post has been updated below to include comments from the folks at Epocrates

The excitement and hype surrounding the announcement of Apple’s iPad have subsided for the time being, perhaps just a lull prior to the actual release in a few months. Here at iMedicalApps, we were certainly among the many believers and expected that the iPad could make significant contributions to healthcare, such as potentially replacing the physician’s clipboard or medical textbooks.

However, we did disagree at times on the extent to which the iPad could penetrate the healthcare market, for a variety of reasons. The folks over at Software Advice decided to try to get a feel for what the community at large was thinking through an interesting survey they performed. And for Apple, the results of this survey aren’t encouraging – if you believe the results.

Having spent nearly four years learning how to read medical literature, I decided to try to get a better sense of just how valid these results are especially considering the seemingly conflicting results of the Epocrates survey. Chris Thorman, who authored the article on the survey, was kind enough to correspond with me on details of the survey methodology. Here’s a look at the results and our take on what they really mean.

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AirStrip Technologies was founded in 2003 by Dr. Cameron Powell, an ObGyn from San Antonio TX, and his partner Trey Moore, who is the software architect behind the products. Their first product, AirStrip OB was launched in 2005 and received FDA clearance in 2006. It allows for a physician to view the real-time fetal heart rate monitor of a woman in labor on an iPhone over a 3G connection. As Donna Morrow, RN, Vice President of Client Services told me, one of the least favorite parts of her job as a labor and delivery nurse was trying to describe a fetal monitor strip to a physician over the phone. When AirStrip OB came to her Houston hospital, she was an instant convert – enough in fact to leave her job of 15 years and join the company.

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We just wanted to draw attention to the 10 free promotional codes offered by Clinically Relevant Technologies for an app we recently reviewed – Low Back Pain Management Guidelines. The promo codes are in the comments section of the app review. This app helps bring the most recent American College of Physicians guidelines regarding this incredibly common problem to the point-of-care. The promotional codes can be found in the comments section of this review. If you use one of the promotional codes, please leave a comment with the code used. And be sure to share your thoughts on this app. Thanks again to Clinically Relevant Technologies for making this kind gesture to our readers!!

P.S. Check out their other apps as well, including the CORE – Clinical Orthopedic Exam app which we recently reviewed as well.

Perhaps it is in the middle of Grand Rounds, during a conversation with colleagues, or maybebetween seeing patients – there are times when a quick scan of the most recent medical literature would be helpful.

PubMed Mobile (Free) is an app for Android that allows the user to search PubMed, save articles and searches, view abstracts, and export selected abstracts and citations for future use.

The developer CRinUS also makes the similar apps: PubChem Mobile, and Entrez Sequence.  All three apps are free.

Here, I review PubMed Mobile, developed by CRinUS.

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Low back pain is virtually an epidemic in the United States. In many surveys, it is listed in the top 3 most frequent patient complaints resulting in a visit to a physician. It also appears to be more prevalent in the United States than in other industrialized societies, with only a muddle of theories available explain this costly difference. For this reason, a systematic methodology of evaluating the patient with back pain is clearly important. This would help the primary care physician, usually the first evaluate the patient, who is quietly worried that she or he might miss an ominous but uncommon etiology such as metastatic cancer. Also from the public health perspective, this methodology would help prevent multiple, unnecessary and costly imaging studies. And, in fact, many detailed evidence-based recommendations have been published over the years, going as far back as 1994.

While the availability of many evidence-based practice guidelines is of great benefit, the multiplicity also becomes a burden for the practicing physician who needs a quick and handy way to answer the question of what to do for a particular patient. Thus, the birth of a category of desktop and mobile applications named clinical decision support systems (CDSS). This growing and important sector bridges the gap between evidence based guidelines and clinical computer applications. Some of the larger players in this sector, such as Zynx Health, aim to integrate directly into the electronic health records (EHRs) used at hospitals. Others have opted for convenient, free-standing applications quickly available to the physician. The iPhone app Low Back Pain Clinical Management Guidelines is an example of the latter.

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