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If you’re a physician, medical student, or in any other health care related field, trying to find the best free medical apps for the iPhone is a hassle.  Apps such as “Dream Meanings”, “Relax Ocean waves”, and “Stool Scanner Lite” dominate the Top Free Medical Apps list in the App Store.  Our top 10 iPhone medical apps list contains no such app, and this isn’t a re-hash of the top downloaded free medical apps either.  Rather, this list contains the top 10 free iPhone medical apps health care professionals and students can actually use on a day to day basis.

MedPage Today’s motto is, “Putting Breaking Medical News Into Practice”.  I’ve been a fan of the website, medpagetoday.com for a few years now because they provide great medical commentary in a short, concise manner.  I call it “high-yield” reading.  Their articles often highlight key papers from the New England Journal or other reputed journals.  Another reason I’m a fan is because of their partnership with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine to provide Continuing Medical Education(CME).  A partnership with a well respected academic institution definitely gives me greater respect for their articles.

All the content from their website has now been brought to the iPhone platform, and the app is free!  Although the application was released awhile back, it was recently updated with some nice additions.  In this review of the MedPage Today Mobile App I’ll cover how to best utilize the features this free application provides.

iCME is a simple mobile database for physicians to track CME (continuing medical education) events. Appreciating its purpose is clouded at first since it doesn’t seem obvious that keeping a list of one’s conferences is weighty enough of a task to devote an entire application. But, it turns out, that is indeed the one and only function of the application. Specifically, the user is asked to manually enter the date, title and hours of every CME event attended and, in return, the user is rewarded with a display of all their events in table format. As every physician needs to document continuing medical education at each biennial state license renewal, the need for recording such events certainly exists. However, the question is whether a dedicated smartphone application beats a simple piece of paper.

We’ve always been a big fan of Medical Radio, the free iPhone app from the folks over at ReachMD. The app is in our top 7 list of medical applications because of the great utility it provides to medical professionals. We actually reviewed an old version of this application, ReachMD CME awhile back. You can find out more information about this live event on the ReachMD site:

“This represents the first national broadcast of it’s kind for continuing medical education where participants can interact with the world renown faculty that NACCME has lined up for this program,” said Gary Epstein, CEO of ReachMD. “ReachMD is proud to continue to deliver innovation in the Medical Education media space and we expect this new live programming to generate as much enthusiasm as our iPhone application last year.”

This event isn’t a one time thing, and will occur eight times from November 16th to December 15th. The schedule of the live events is listed on their website.

You can participate and ask questions during the live broadcast via phone(888-MD1-REACH), email (CME@ReachMD.com), and twitter(CMEonReachMD). Participation in the event is free, just like the application.

Here is an excerpt of what we wrote in the past about the Medical Radio app by ReachMD:

We thought the ReachMD CME app had promise, but didn’t capitalize on it’s full potential. Needless to say, the Medical Radio app definitely does not disappoint. This app provides an easy way for you to get CME credit by listening to streaming CME education from legitimate health care professionals, and then taking quizzes right through your phone. Imagine getting CME credit while on a train ride or in some waiting line. Imagine no more.

The iTunes link to the Medical Radio application can be found here.

We’ve been reviewing medical apps and providing news for a few weeks now and thought it would be a good idea to list some of our favorite apps. As you can see from our title, we’re pretty excited about this post. These are the top medical apps we find useful for the hospital setting and medical school. We’ve reviewed some of these apps on this website, but not all. Eventually we’ll have a list of top medical apps for practicing clinicians and students, using our own backgrounds in each. In this post we’ll rank the 7 most useful medical apps.

WebMD has launched a new app directed towards health care providers. Medscape is a free app and was launched a few days ago. I like this app because of it’s speed. It’s great for looking up med dosages (adult vs. peds, etc), interactions, and pricing. If you’d rather not wait a few extra seconds for Epocrates to load in order to look up a simple drug dosage, then you should try this app. I found the user interface to be nice and quick.

Medscape has a CME section and a medical news section, which I didn’t find as useful. There is also a section where you can look up nearby hospitals, physicians, and pharmacies. The only downside I could find for this app is they ask for you name, email address, etc before you can use it. I fudged most of that information though and it took me just a few minutes to set up. Medscape has a nice interactive website set up here.

ReachMD CME is an app that allows you to get CME (continued medical education) credits by listening to discussions and then taking a short exam afterwards, all through your iPhone or itouch.  This app is free and in this review we’ll discuss how to best utilize the features of this application.