iPhone Medical App
Cardiothoracic surgeon develops app to predict risk of heart surgery
Dr. Edward Bender of Missouri has released five iPhone apps, all designed to assist patients and surgeons contemplating cardiac and thoracic procedures. His newest iPhone app, CTSNetWiki, gathers data from all the major cardiothoracic societies to allow patients and doctors to compute the risk of various heart surgeries.
In this interview with the South East Missourian, Dr. Bender remarked
If I’m talking to a patient and they want to know their chances of [surgical] complications, I can just whip this out and tell you how your case compares to the other four million in the database.
Dr. Bender said he’s working on a grant application to help with funding and to expand the business. While many app developers seek clinicians to help identify worthwhile clinical projects, there is a unique advantage to a physician who can play both roles. We look forward to seeing what Dr. Bender dreams of next. [St. Louis Business Journal]
The number one downloaded medical app for the iPhone – Medscape [App Review]
Here we review the Medscape iPhone medical app, the number one downloaded medical app since August 2009 – when they claimed the throne from Epocrates. The Medscape app is developed by WebMD, obviously a well-regarded and trustworthy source for medical news and content.
We first reviewed the Medscape app when it launched in July 2009, but here we offer a more extensive review that covers the newer Medscape 2.1 version – the 2.0 update brought huge updates that made this application number one in our top 10 medical apps list.
As for the app itself, the home screen features a search function, medical news, sections for Drugs, Diseases & Conditions, Clinical Procedures, a drug Interaction Checker, and a bottom bar with more functions.
The news that appears here is in the specialty one used when initially logging in with an account (here for Internal Medicine, but the user can easily change this, as discussed later in this review).
Low Back Pain Clinical Management Guidelines App: Evidence-Based Guidelines for a Common Problem [App Review]
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.
Triage and Treat Patients From Anywhere with Allscripts Remote iPhone App- An Electronic Health Record and ePrescribing Tool (upcoming Android support)
This article is part of iMedicalApps HIMSS 2010 Coverage. It includes a brief review of the Allscripts Remote app for the iPhone as well as details of a conversation with Allscripts executives who revealed that they are moving to development of an Android app.
When Allscripts announced the launch of Allscripts Remote last year, an iPhone application for their popular electronic medical record, it was widely touted as a transformational move. Forbes Magazine called this an app “that could change medicine.” Allscripts origins are interesting, shifting from prepackaged medicine to e-prescribing solutions before entering the electronic health record industry. In fact, according to the marketing folks at the Allscripts booth, they are the largest source of e-prescriptions in the United States. And while Epic, Cerner, and Eclypsis may be the players many of us commonly think about, Allscripts definitely definitely is not little – according to their most recent SEC filing, Allscripts had over $500million in revenue for 2009 with a net income of $26million. By comparison, Epic also had $500million in revenue for 2009. So the inclusion of a rich, clinically useful mobile platform with Allscripts Remote has certainly been a big move in the EHR world.
The iPhone App: Frankly, this is the mobile EHR app that clinicians have been waiting for. Imagine being at dinner with your family. The paging service for your practice sends you a text – Mr. Jones called in because he’s got some swelling in his legs.
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:
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.
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
Top 10 Free iPhone Medical Apps for Health care Professionals
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.
iPhone used to do actual chest compressions – ED physician demos Pocket CPR app – Innovative or Weird?
An ED physician from Croatia uses a free app, Pocket CPR, to deliver actual chest compressions. He uses the built in iPhone accelerometer plus a custom designed cradle to deliver the compressions. I’m not sure if this functionality would actually be useful? We’d be interested to know what you think. Continue on to see the actual video.
iPhone Security Risks and How to Protect Your Data
The iPhone and iPod Touch platforms have gained huge popularity with medical providers, with Epocrates saying over 100,000 physicians are actively using the medical reference app on their iPhone – and this was back in July of 2009.
Many healthcare providers feel comfortable with the iPhone because of its fluid operating system, and the extra functionality it offers, in the form of games and a variety of other apps. This added functionality is missing with more enterprise-based smart phones, such as the Blackberry platform. However, this added functionality comes with a price, and exposes the iPhone to security risks.
Nicolas Seriot, a researcher from the Swiss University of Applied Sciences, has found some alarming design flaws in the iPhone operating system that allow rouge apps to access sensitive information on your phone.
Motion Computing – One of the iPad’s Competitors in the Medical Tablet World
When I first entered the clinical world, physician order entry and electronic medical records were just concepts to me. As I learned how to navigate the hospital, diagnose everything from the mundane to the incredibly rare (my first patient was a baby with an idiopathic subdural venous thrombosis), and figure out how to treat the sick, I also had to learn how to use those two systems as a prerequisite to doing everything else. The four hours of class didn’t seem to cut it, so I probably spent at least a month trying to get my bearings on how to manage these IT systems. So for anyone who is already familiar with some form of healthcare technology, in this case a tablet, I suspect the adoption cost is far higher than just the price tag. You may be surprised how highly some medical students and residents weigh the notion of learning a new system in their career decisions. And because of what seems to be a particularly high barrier to adopting new information technology in healthcare, anyone interested in whether the iPad will succeed in healthcare should first ask who the competition is.
