Editors note: We now have an updated “Top 20 Free iPhone Medical Apps List”. It can be found at this link.

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.

If you want free apps, make sure to “Like” us on our Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter. We give out tons of free medical apps on our Facebook wall and our Twitter feed – you can find interesting commentary on these platforms and it’s where we interact with our readers frequently as well: http://www.facebook.com/iMedicalApps ; http://twitter.com/imedicalapps

1) Medscape

We mentioned this app when it was released in the summer of 2009.  At the time I doubt many thought it would ever eclipse Epocrates in the top free medical apps section of the App Store, but with significant recent updates it’s accomplished this feat.

This app always had a great drug reference section, with over 6,000 generic, brand, and OTC drugs, along with a drug interaction checker.  But with recent updates, Medscape now has a Diseases and Conditions section, along with a Clinical Procedures section.  These added sections aren’t just fluff, they actually contain concise and useful information, with videos and pictures to boot.  We plan on doing a full review in the near future.

Links: iMedicalApps Review, Website, iTunes
Cost: Free

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.

When you open up the application you’re asked to register, although you don’t need to provide any personal identifying information if you don’t want to, just your specialty and what type of topics you’re interested in.  In the settings menu you can change your specialty information and topics of interest.  You can also set up the twitter client you want to use if you plan on tweeting stories you read through the application.

Per your specialty and topics of interest, you’re shown different categories, such as Cardiovascular, Heme/Onc, etc.  After selecting a particular specialty, you’re presented with the latest related articles.  These articles deliver information through video, audio, or text.  Almost all the articles contain CME credit opportunities.  After reading, hearing, or viewing the information in an article, you can take a post test at the end to get CME credit.

What I liked:

• Ability to get CME credit in the palm of your hand
• You can tweet and e-mail the article your just read
• Once you load articles they are saved on your device and you can access them in “off-line” mode.
• One of my favorite categories is the default “Latest News” category.  Often this section correlates with the front page of MedPageToday.  It’s basically akin to CNN headlines made for healthcare providers
• Nice user interface
• Don’t need to register with username or password if you only want to read the articles

What I didn’t like so much:

I like to listen to the videos and audio when I have my iPhone hooked up to my car.  When the phone goes into sleep mode the audio and video stop, and the same thing happens when I click the hold button.  Hopefully this is a bug that will be worked out in the next edition.

What I’d like to see in future updates:

• more access to all the information on the website.  I find a lot of the commentary interesting, and instead of only one default category, “latest news”, it would be nice to add more specific categories of news and commentary.
• When you want to take the post test for CME credit you are linked to safari.  It would be nice to have the ability to take the test within the application.
• Ability to Bookmark your favorite articles
• Ability to share articles via Facebook.

Conclusion:

The ability to attain CME credits from the palm of your hand is definitely a huge service this application provides, but I feel the ability to get current medical news is just as beneficial.  Even if you aren’t interested in getting CME credits, the CME articles are extremely informative and concise. You can read and listen to them on the go in order to stay up to date with hot button topics related to medicine.  The app is useful for not only providers, but medical students and residents as well and would definitely be helpful in the wards when getting grilled by attendings on updated medical guidelines.

In the future, I’d love to see this application expand even more to include all the rich content included on the MedPage Today website, but overall, this is a great medical application and a must have for healthcare providers and students.

Also, MedPage Today has another app, CME store[iTunes Link], that bundles together CME articles related specifically to your specialty.  We’re working on a review of this app and will release it soon.

[itunes]

[website]

Update:

There actually is a save/bookmark button, contrary to what I said above.  My apologies on the oversight and thanks to the MedPage Today team for catching this.

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.

What I liked about this app:

• It addresses a real need
• Simple to understand

What I did not like:

• The application does not add up CME hours per time period, an important oversight
• There is no way to specify recurring CME events
• If the idea is that a smartphone allows for quick, on-site data entry, then the default behavior should be to request the smallest possible amount of information, however the application default is 10 data fields per event (customizable to a maximum of 18 fields!)
• Similarly, requiring the user to scroll through 17 different types of CME events seems inconsiderate

What I Would Like to See in Future Versions:

• This type of app might more naturally exist as a mobile interface to a web application, that way the data can be viewed and backed up online
• Perhaps better would be integration with an existing web information service, such as Evernote, so as to spare us accrual of yet another on-line service
• Yet even better might be re-imagining it more as a calendar add-on and have it accept email event invites (standard VCAL format from Outlook or iCal), to which it simply adds the CME hours on top of the existing calendar event data – why enter the same information twice?

Conclusion:

The developers state on their iTunes page “Every health professional will find this program invaluable!”. Well, that might be a slight overstatement. While logging CME events is certainly a necessity, it is not a burning need for most physicians. The occurrences are infrequent and will probably leave some trail of evidence (emails, handouts, etc) so that they can be recalled at a later date. It is not clear that physicians will compulsively remember to use a dedicated free-standing application to log their CME events. In reality, a simple paper list or text document will suffice for most people . As always, any new service will have to provide a high enough value proposition for folks to change behavior. Nevertheless, iCME does provide a simple and useful venue to address an existing need. Perhaps if the developers imagined a way to integrate this application into existing products and services, it could become even more useful.

[itunes]

[website]

Dr. Wodajo is one of our senior writers on the iMedical Apps team.  He brings an extensive clinical background to the reviews and commentary he provides.  He is a bone and soft tissue tumor specialist with interests in health policy, technology, and tumor research. His blog can be found at http://www.orthoonc.com.

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.

7) Medical Radio (v 1.1), Free: This app is brought to you by ReachMD. We reviewed one of their earlier apps, ReachMD CME. We thought ReachMD CME had promise, but didn’t capitalize on it’s full potential. Needless to say, Medical Radio 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.

6) Medical Spanish (v 1.2), $6.99: This is definitely the best medical spanish app out right now. What makes this app better than the rest is it’s search function. There are hundreds of medically related phrases to choose from, all you have to do is search. The app helps you ask yes/no questions, allowing you to use this for basic questions even if you have no Spanish background. It’s handy when you’re waiting on a translator to get to your patient’s room (sometimes a long, frustrating experience). Check out our full review.

5) Speed Muscles MD and Speed Bones MD, $2.99, $1.99: These two are great apps for people learning anatomy. They are definitely helpful for graduate level anatomy courses, even gross anatomy in med school. They won’t replace your netter’s flash cards, but will provide you with a fun way to study your musculoskeletal section of gross anatomy. Our full review is here: Speed Muscles , Speed Bones

4) MedCalc (v 1.2), Free: A FREE medical calculator that is actually BETTER than all the paid medical calculators we tried. Provides all the key medical equations you need and has an all important search function so you can make quick calculations during morning rounds. Check out our full review.

3) Epocrates: What can we say about this app that you probably don’t know? We do know there is a 99% chance you already have this app. Great for dosing, but the free version still leaves much to be desired. The version has it all, but it’s a bit pricey.

2) iMurmur (v 1.0), $0.99: This app shot to the top of the medical apps category in it’s first week of release. Probably the most innovate app from this list. Beautiful app for learning heart sounds and pathologic heart murmurs. In our full review we said it’s the best app we’ve reviewed on this site. We didn’t put it at the top of the list because it’s more of a study tool, and not something we use in the hospital as much. We are still shocked at how low the price is for this app, we would have easily paid at least 5 times the amount. Check out our full review.

1) Diagnosaurus (v. 1.3), $0.99: The most useful app ever invented for Morning Rounds. Great app for helping formulate a differential, especially when you’re on the 29th hour of a 30 hour shift and you’re still admitting patients. This app is not complex like some of the above apps, but it’s simplicity and ease of use is why we love it. Check out our full review.

-iMedical Apps Team

Our goal is to provide a site that allows the medical community an information hub to medical applications that are actually beneficial in practice. If you’d like to contribute to this goal and submit a review of a medical or healthcare application to this site, email us. We welcome physicians, nurses, PAs, medical students, and anyone else in the healthcare field to write a review. A prerequisite to reviewing an app is you can’t have any affiliations with the developers of the application, we strive to maintain an objective site.

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.

Advantages:

• Good discussions on evidence based medicine from knowledgeable doctors.
• Discussions are mostly about primary care related topics.
• Does not require you to have read the studies prior to the discussion
• Quick and easy to load, only 30 minutes long, and enable you to make a car drive more productive
• Can take the short test built into the program, which allows you to get CME credit, ranging from .25 to 1.0 (AMA) credits depending on the topic.

Improvements that could be made:

• Better organization of the list of discussions. It would be nice if the discussions were organized by specalties.
• More discussions. There are a limited number of discussions (<50)
• App has not been updated for some time.

Who this app would be great for:

• Doctors / PA / 3rd or 4th year medical student
• Each of the above could use this app in a different way. Doctors and PAs could actually use this for CME credit. Medical students, especially 3rd and 4th years would find the discussions useful for the wards.

Conclusion:

Overall I’d recommend this app to the above people if you want something to listen to in the car besides the same music, or if NPR is playing its eclectic music, unless of course, you’re into that type of thing. I feel that this app has more potential, and it would be great if they could add more discussion links within the app. Currently this app has 3 /5 starts, which I’d agree with. If you’re interested, you can find it here, ReachMD CME.

Further Review:

ReachMD actually has a XM radio channel (160), where these discussions happen, and my assumption is they take those talks and transfer them to the app. You can also get the talks through podcasts that ReachMD offers.

The content of the discussions are organized well. There get 2 to 3 MD’s who talk about a particular topic. Some examples are in the picture above, and they range from asthma to diabetes. Most of the topics that the app has are heavy on primary care. The discussions are almost all 30 minutes long, with CME credit varying from .25 to 1.0 credits.

The speakers usually have backgrounds from academic institutions and the program does a good job of giving full disclosure before the discussion. Relevant conflicts are fully identified. The speakers usually do a good job of sumarizing new and relevant studies that are related to the current topic. They give their own personal recomendations but do a good job of presenting the actual data from the studies. An example is the “steming the tide of type 2 diabetes” discussions. They did a great job of presenting the ACCORD data in a brief amount of time. This isn’t like journal club where if you haven’t read the study you’re going to feel completely lost.

The fact that you can access these discussions on your phone is key. I found myself using this app on long drives and it was resonably entertaining, in bit of a nerdy manner though. The app does a decent job of loading on EDGE, although 3G is ideal. Wifi works great as well.

In order to use this app you need to register your email address, and they will start sending you weekly emails, although you can unsubscribe. To take the brief test at the end you have to register extra user information, such as your address and license. However, this information isn’t required if you just want to listen to the lectures. Your specality / occupation are also asked, but that information isn’t used to organize your discussion.

There is also a search feature built within the app that isn’t too useful. There are a little under 50 discussions posted right now, and I haven’t seen any get added over the last few months. This might be an issue in the future as the students being mentioned might become a bit outdated.

[itunes]

[website]