iMedicalApps » iphone medical apps

Home Health services utilizing mobile technology for better patient care

Iltifat Husain — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:02:38 +0000

It only make sense for mobile health services to get involved with mobile technology. We’ve reported before how health systems are utilizing the iPad itself for its mobile healthcare workers – hospice and home health nurses. Home health services enable patients to get out of the hospital faster – which usually means better outcomes.

Whiteglove House Call Health is another home health service just recently getting into the mobile tech fray:

“WhiteGlove Mobile allows our members to schedule a visit, view their medical history, visit history and membership status — all from their iPhone or iPod Touch,” says Michael Grabert, WhiteGlove’s vice president of software development.

“This is one example of an innovative solution we’ve developed in order to enhance our members’ health care experience.”

We’ve all had patients who weren’t able to be discharged on time – stayed that extra day, and developed a central line infection or worse. Hopefully home health services will continue to utilize mobile technology not only to improve patient care, but to enable patients to get out of the hospital faster with improved home monitoring services.

Source: SanAntonio BizJournals

Related Posts:

MedWaitTime iPhone application lets patients know if their doctor is running late

Felasfa Wodajo, MD — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:19:36 +0000

MedWaitTime is an interesting application that allows subscribing doctors and emergency rooms/urgent care centers post their schedule availability online. Patients can download the free application and enter their appointment time and their doctor’s name. The doctor’s office updates their status as necessary, or if they are available for walk-ins. The service appears to be supported by subscription fees to physicians of $50/month or $300/month for facilities.

This is part of a trend of real-time communication between patients and care-providers to help all of us avoid spending time in that most dreaded of places – the doctor’s waiting room. Another interesting service in the same vertical is ZocDoc (reviewed on this site) which is rapidly growing by combining physician rating with on-line scheduling for patients.

The next evolution for these communication services will be when the doctors’ practice management systems integrate with the patient-facing applications to automatically broadcast appointment times and accept requests. Given the real hunger for frictionless appointment management both for the doctor and the patient, this should be an attainable future. [MedWaitTime, BolderImage, iTunes link]

Related Posts:

New Innovations iOS4 update allows health care professionals to track procedures easier

Yousif Alkadhi, MD — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:00:56 +0000

As a medical resident, our program uses New Innovations web service to track procedures and duty hours. If your program happens to use New Innovations, then their recently updated iOS4 app is a must have!

I’m always a fan of any app that going to save me time, money or energy, and this app does two out of the three (not bad for being free). I’ve been using their GME application for over a year now, however until their most recent update, it only served as a procedure logger, and was fairly limited at that.

There were no options for saving your user name or password, and although it was great to have a quick way to instantly keep track of procedures, I just wasn’t using it every day.

With the roll out of iOS4, many app developers are using the opportunity not only to add new features, but to polish up their apps as well, and this one happens to reap the benefits.

As mentioned above, the application now allows you to track duty hours directly from the phone. And while I may not have a procedure to track every day, it does feel like I work almost every day, which definitely means I have plentiful opportunities to use the app.

Additionally, the application now allows for user ID and password saving, so I don’t have to re-type my credentials numerous times daily. With so many user names and passwords I have out there for the various EMRs we use at home and away rotations, one less thing to have to remember and re-type is warmly welcomed (and a time saver).

Navigating through most of the app is very scroll and click friendly, and it works reliably. If you don’t happen to have internet access, you can still input and save your hours / procedure information, and simply “sync” with the NI servers later.

This app won’t replace using the NI website entirely. After you sync your data, it disappears from your device, forever residing on NI’s servers. That means you won’t be able to locally review all of your synced hours or procedures from within the app. And you don’t have access to any of the other NI features, such as reviewing evaluations or writing evaluations (if your program uses NI for feedback).

Again, the best part of the app is that it replaces the act of taking notes, saving me time and effort. Whether it was writing or highlighting a patient’s name on a list or even typing a “note” in my phone, now I can skip directly to logging and 60 seconds later I’m done! All in all, this app update is a welcome addition and gives me another reason to reach for my phone on my walk out after a shift.

New Innovations: iTunes Link

Related Posts:

American Medical News does a feature on three physician medical app developers

Iltifat Husain — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 07:19:06 +0000

AMN recently did a feature on three physician developers who have created innovative medical mobile tools for the iPhone. The three physicians mentioned: Dr. Pieter Kubben – developer of Neuromind, Dr. Pascal Pfiffner – developer of Eponyms, and Dr. Gregory Moore – developer of iPregnancy.

The article goes on to talk about how these three physicians have navigated the mobile medical landscape, and used their clinical skills to develop successful apps. We actually did an interview with Dr. Kubben awhile back – who is a neurosurgery resident, and we’re definitely huge fans of his work. In our interview we talked about his catalog of free apps and the inspiration behind his work.

It’s great to see medical professionals taking their clinical skills into the mobile medical world and being successful as developers. By the way, Eponyms and Neuromind made our top 10 free medical apps list.

Source: American Medical News

Related Posts:

Doctors use iPhone, iPad to provide treatments at a Japan hospital

Felasfa Wodajo, MD — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:44:15 +0000

Jikei University Hospital in Japan has launched an iPhone application designed to assist diagnosing stroke symptoms in patients. The system sends CT images of brain aneurysm patients to doctors’ iPhones so decisions for surgery can be made quickly. The hospital is partnering with Fujifilm Corp. to develop similar systems for other hospitals. [Daily Yomiuri Online]

Other doctors use their iPhones when making house calls, remotely accessing patients’ medical records database and sending patient photos back for inclusion into their records.

“Surprisingly, compared with other professionals, medical practitioners lag in their use of IT tools.”

Prof. Hiroshi Mizushima, a medical informatics expert at Tokyo Medical and Dental University was quoted as saying.

We agree that smartphones are an excellent tool to share imaging results. Having access to graphical results is an a natural fit for a medical smartphone applications, even more than access to large volumes of textual data, especially with high resolution touch screens and pinch-to-zoom functionality.

Source:daily yomiuri online

Related Posts:

iMedicalApps.com is growing rapidly – medical professionals and students are invited to contribute

iMedicalApps Team — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:38:52 +0000

iMedicalApps.com is growing rapidly – and we want more of the medical community to participate. If you’re a healthcare provider or student in healthcare, and interested in mobile technology, we’d love for you to apply.

Don’t feel restricted to the iPhone platform. We’re welcoming Android, Blackberry, and Palm writers. We’re also welcoming other healthcare providers as well, nurses, PAs, and more.

We are currently looking for two more staff writers – so contact us if you’re interested and we’ll let you know how to apply. If you’d rather not be a fixture on the site, we’re welcoming guest posts as well.

In this interview with the Orlando Medical News, senior editor Felasfa Wodajo talks about ithe history of the site and shares some thoughts about the future of smartphone medical apps.

Contact iMedicalApps

Related Posts:

Top Doc iPhone app features medical images and quizzes to let medical students & residents improve their visual diagnosis

Felasfa Wodajo, MD — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:01:32 +0000

Developed jointly by Elsevier and Legacy Interactive, this app features quizzes with more than 600 questions for levels ranging from novice to expert. Users try to determine the correct diagnosis by viewing actual photographs depicting a condition or abnormality on the body [MinOnline.com].

A representative from Legacy Interactive noted:

“Given the cost of developing iPhone apps, and the early state of the industry, Top Doc can be considered an experiment—a relatively low risk way to gather information about the potential business opportunity, models, and market.”

Medical school has a well deserved reputation for requiring hours of mindless memorizing. An approach to learning that blends in fun and gaming could well stand out among the proliferation of educational apps on smartphones.

more

Related Posts:

Cardiac ultrasound teaching brought to the iPhone – Echocardiography Atlas medical app gets reviewed

Amit Patel, MD — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:05:28 +0000

Cardiac ultrasound represents an often-called-upon imaging modality for diagnosis and surveillance in a wide range of both inpatients and outpatients, including those with myocardial infarctions, congestive heart failure symptoms, cardiomyopathies, congenital valvular abnormalities, suspected endocarditis, and so many more symptom presentations and illnesses.

Not only should cardiologists be facile with the interpretation of echocardiograms, but many physicians and physicians-in-training can benefit from a familiarity with formal as well as beside ultrasound imaging of the heart.

Here we review the Echocardiography Atlas App, edited by a Harvard Medical School professor and designed by Modality.

Edited by Dr. Scott Solomon, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Noninvasive Cardiac Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Echo Atlas App is designed in conjunction with Modality.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Durham, NC, Modality prides itself as a “premier developer of interactive learning, assessment, training and reference apps.” Since the App Store launched in July 2008, Modality has released more than 140 apps for iPhone®, iPod touch® and iPad™ in partnership with Elsevier, CSI, McGraw-Hill Professional, Pearson, The Princeton Review, Thieme Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Wolters Kluwer, among others. In our opinion, Modality has a solid and substantial history of producing well-built educational apps, especially those for health care education.

As for the app itself, the Echo Atlas is organized into twelve chapters of normal and abnormal echocardiograms, as shown on the app’s home screen:

The app encompasses 250 annotated images and 189 videos, all organized into these 12 chapters shown above. Clicking on a chapter, such as “Aortic Valve Disease,” brings up the chapter’s associated images and videos:

The video buttons depict which images have associated videos with the particular finding and ultrasound view. Moreover, chapters are also searchable for specific terms.

Alternatively, the “All Figures” function from the home screen brings up the entirety of the Echo Atlas’s collection, sorted by chapter but with the ability to quickly search for a desired image or video:

Regardless of how a topic and view is selected (here, bicuspid aortic valve in the parasternal long-axis, or PLAX, view), the app features an annotated image with or without a video, and several sentences highlighting the topic as well as pointing out a couple key elements to observe on the image and video:

The images (here, the normal exam in the PLAX view) are generally well-annotated with labels, and have the option to toggle the labels on or off:

Related Posts:

Medical App News 7/8/10

Felasfa Wodajo, MD — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:00:33 +0000

Cisco announces Cius tablet, potential competitor for the iPad in healthcare

The Cius is a 7-in., 1.15 lbs. tablet powered by an Intel Atom processor and Google’s Android OS version 2.2. Computerworld compares how the Cius may be attractive to hospital CIO’s.

more

Microsoft Aims To Alleviate Health IT Cloud Concerns

Healthcare providers still have many reservations about the security of cloud computing for electronic medical records and mission-critical apps.[Infoworld]

more

Related Posts:

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center releases iPhone app for patients

Iltifat Husain — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:00:08 +0000

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the revered flagship teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, just released an application for the iPhone aimed at squarely at patients. The app enables patients to learn more about the medical center through various tutorials, but it’s main purpose is to allow patients to search for affiliated doctors.

You can search for physicians by name, specialty, and location. The app uses your phone’s native GPS to find the closest affiliated doctors by specialty. When you find a particular physician profile, you are given a contact number and an address of where they practice. Per the description of the app on iTunes, you can send e-mails to physicians, but I was unable to find this feature in the physician profiles I went through.

Needless to say, with the proliferation of “find a doctor near you” type applications, it’s smart for medical institutions to come up with their own apps – especially academic centers who are able to offer a multitude of specialties. For most academic centers, it will probably be easier to use an app to get the contact information of a specialist, verse their often complicated websites.

Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center iPhone app: iTunes Link ; Website Link

Related Posts:

Medical section for iPhone is plagued by non-medical apps

Iltifat Husain — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:02:39 +0000

There are well over 3,000 apps in the “medical” section of the App Store for the iPhone. Unfortunately, a growing number of them aren’t medical apps. It’s already difficult enough to parse through the litany of apps available to find quality apps – and then when you add apps that shouldn’t even be in the medical category, it makes the job that much harder.

Lets start with the “top 10 downloaded free iphone medical apps” in the App Store. Notice how the word “downloaded” is in bold. By no means do we think these apps are the best free iphone medical apps – we’ve already chronicled that list in another post.

These are the top 10 downloaded free medical apps in the App Store: Medscape, Sex-Facts, Epocrates, Medpage Today, Marijuana Truth, iAugment, Dream Meaning, Medical Encyclopedia, Body Systems – Anatomy Quiz, and Best Diet foods. Note, Medscape, Epocrates, and Medpage Today are extremely legitimate apps – they even made our top 10 free iphone medical apps list. Sex-Facts, Marijuana Truth, iAugment, Dream Meaning, and Best diet foods will never make any top 10 list of ours.

By our calculations, 12 of the top 25 downloaded medical apps, 48 percent, are mis-categorized and should not be in the medical section. So we looked into this a bit further.

What about the “paid” medical apps section. Surely the paid section would be more populated with apps in the right section – and it was. But again, some very odd choices for “medical apps”. Emergency radio, the 6th most downloaded paid medical app, and Police radio, the 17th most downloaded paid medical app, should clearly not be in the medical section of the App Store. It seems as if the developers threw in the word “EMT”, and Apple figured it sounded “medical enough”.

It’s not as if these apps don’t have other sections they could go in. There are 20 other categories in the App Store, and the apps I mentioned at the beginning could clearly go into the healthcare section.

As the App Store continues to grow at a rapid rate, it would be great if Apple did some housekeeping, and fixed its categories, or at least defined them better. The longer they let apps that shouldn’t belong in the medical section blossom, the more cumbersome the process of going through the apps becomes. Let’s hope this happens sooner than later.

Related Posts:

3D brain app is on the iPad – it’s still free and fun to use

Iltifat Husain — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:22:14 +0000

We’ve mentioned before how we’re huge fans of the app “3D brain” on the iPhone. The 3D app is derived from the Genes to Cognition Online website, funded by the Dana Foundation and Hewlett Foundation. Using the iPad’s native gestures, the app allows you to zoom and rotate images of the brain in a three dimensional fashion.

We had a lot of fun using the app on the iPhone, but with the increased real estate on the iPad, it’s gotten better. Click through to see more screen shots of the app in action – have fun manipulating the brain with this app!

Related Posts:

iPhone 4 features the medical community can be excited about: Retinal Display and enhanced PDF viewing

Iltifat Husain — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:01:03 +0000

As most of you know, the iPhone 4 was just announced by Steve Jobs today. The iPhone 4G brings significant upgrades from the 3GS – video conferencing, multi-tasking, HD video recording, and more. The overall look of the phone is different as well, it’s being proclaimed as the “thinnest smart phone ever” by Steve Jobs.

In the mountain of new features announced today, there are two that should stand out for the medical community. Retinal Display and PDF viewing. As more details emerge, this post will get updated accordingly.

Retinal Display:

Apple now has the sharpest and highest resolution smart phone – they are calling it “Retinal Display”. While the screen size is still 3.5 inches (diagonal), the pixel resolution is now 960 by 640, 326 pixels per inch. For comparison sake, the 3GS had a resolution of 480 by 320, 163 pixels per inch. Obviously, the iPhone 4′s display is a tremendous leap forward.

How this effects the medical community:

This new resolution is huge for radiology viewing apps. We’ve highlighted the huge interest in these capabilities in the past, and the DICOM viewer, OsiriX, has already been used in a study to accurately diagnose appendicitis. I’ve already been in contact with a radiologist who is extremely excited about this new display, and can’t wait to see developers make use of it.

The enhanced display bodes well for other health care professionals as well. Everyone has had a patient who has taken a picture of an abnormal skin lesion or another pathology and the picture is blurry, or demarcations are hard to distinguish because of the phone’s resolution. The iPhone 4′s display will make viewing these images more comfortable and accurate. There are plenty of applications where an enhanced display will be key as well, such as the free radiology learning app, iRadiology. Anatomy teaching apps should get a boost from the new display as well.

PDF viewing:

The ability to view PDFs on the iPhone is not new, but its cumbersome when reading them on the iPhone. Obviously, the ability to read medical literature, in the form of PDF files is key, so developers have made apps that provide a solution. iAnnotate and Papers are two of these solutions available for the iPhone and iPad. iAnnotate gives you a wide array of annotating tools, while Papers is an app that helps you organize and store your collection of PDFs with ease.

However, it looks like the Apple iOS4 (renamed from iPhone OS) will allow you to view your PDF files in the iBooks app. On initial screen shots, it appears you’ll be able to edit and highlight PDF files. iBooks will sync across your iPhone and iPad – allowing you to keep your PDF files organized. This new capability is more of an operating system upgrade, rather than a feature just for the iPhone 4 – and we’re definitely excited to see how our literature will look in iBooks.

From Apple’s Website:

As we find out more we’ll be updating and editing this page.

One of our physician friends (statcoder) who is live at WWDC had the following comments sent to us. He is also happy to answer questions via the comments section below, so feel free to ask away.

“The WWDC keynote just wrapped up a few minutes ago with Steve Jobs presenting the new iPhone 4, Apple’s answer to the competition which has clearly ramped up.

Of interest to medical users will be a doubling of the pixel density from previous models. The new resolution exceeds the ability of the human retina to detect detail at normal viewing distances. There is also new multitasking in iOS4 (the new name for iPhone OS).

The main consumer push will be a front-facing camera for video chat via wifi. The user can switch from the front to the back camera so this would also be appropriate to show what one is actually looking at. One could imagine some applications for consultations. Apple is going to make the video conferencing platform open in the hopes of facilitating widespread adoption. It’s all about the iPhone this week at WWDC.”

Related Posts:

STATworkUP app has potential as clinical decision support tool but is not yet robust [App Review]

iMedicalApps Team — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 07:57:19 +0000

By: Jessica Otte, MD

STATworkUP, now in its fourth version, is an App designed to help clinicians with the diagnostic thought process and to provide them with evidence-based facts about symptoms and disorders. If you are not a health care professional who does diagnostics, this probably won’t be your thing (and it will be over your head). Self-proclaimed ‘Medical Decision Support computing,’ this software approaches clinical decision-making in a way that mirrors actual practice.

Program Layout:

The layout is straightforward but I would not say that the workings of the program are equally as obvious. The bottom menu bar provides the ability to search Symptoms, Studies, Diagnoses, and Treatments.

To start, one can use the menu bar to navigate to Symptoms, select a few symptoms from the list, press ‘Findings’ to review the choices, and the proceed to ‘Differential’ to get the goods. The Symptoms section is the only one in which multiple entries can be selected.

Under Studies, Diagnoses, and Treatments, each entry, once highlighted, will reveal more information about that subject. Then, it can be correlated with a subset of Problems/Disorders/Tests/and Remedies which are alternate names for the Symptoms/Studies/Diagnoses/ and Treatments contents.

What I Liked:

Overall, there is a lot of information below the surface in this program. Contained within the information section of each symptom, lab, or diagnoses there are encyclopedic, point-form descriptions. Also, it is fast. Using the search bar will quickly yield the item you seek. If you want more detailed information, there are integrated web searches, accessed easily with the “info” button which appears with each entry.

Where it really shines, I think, if you are interested in one ‘hallmark’ symptom. There aren’t a lot of references that correlate symptoms to disease so this can be very handy for helping recall that condition that goes with Adie’s pupil or Fetor Hepaticus!

As I found it difficult to get success with my symptom correlations (see below), I think the program is best used in what I might call ‘reverse.’ It’s easiest to view the disorders or lab tests first, read more about their details, and then correlate backwards with the associate symptoms. The treatment section is particularly good in that, unlike a classic drug guide, it provides a more exhaustive list of indications including off-label uses.

Whether intended or not, the App isn’t without humour. Select Cannibalism, Annoys People (Deliberately), and Condom Nonuse (Failure) from the symptoms and try to correlate them. The result? Kuru!

What I didn’t like:

Their caveat is true – this really cannot replace a clinician, and of course it isn’t expected to. There may be 10, 000 entries, but some basic things like Dehydration or Hypovolemia are absent (instead there is “mucosal dryness” – not intuitive!). Less common ‘signs’ (like splinter hemorrhages, Janeway lesions, Osler’s nodes, Sister-Mary Joseph’s nodule, etc.) are lacking also.

The lines between symptom/labs/diagnosis are quite blurry. You have to know where to look; there are lots of things that can be both signs/symptoms and diagnoses unto themselves such as hemorrhoids. For these, you just have to look through the different sections until you find them. Obviously a lot of work has gone into making the associations thorough but unless you are in the mind of the designer, you will struggle to chose correlations which yield the expected results.

For example, I often see elderly patients with falls, confusion, and dehydration (“mucosal dryness” in the terms of this App). When I correlate these features, I get a differential which is extensive but still misses the mark. Common things that present this way such as urinary tract infections (UTIs) and hypercalcemia do not appear. Instead “Wallenberg Syndrom” and “vestibular neuronitis” are listed as most likely. Expand the differential and things like “Plague,” “Insulinoma,” and “Shy-Drager Syndrome” appear. Common things are conspicuously absent. Though this isn’t what I expected, the bizarre results are good in that they will challenge you to consider unusual diagnoses and keep a wide view of the differential.

Some entries are obviously not comprehensive. It wasn’t 2 seconds before I had stumbled across entries in the treatment section that had no information about them and had very sparse correlations (despite my knowledge otherwise).

Conclusion:

This program probably works a dream in the hands of its creators, but in mine, it’s a bit cumbersome. I do applaud the effort at what I think is the beginning of a great clinical decision making tool, but it’s not quite ‘fleshed out’ enough yet. I can’t help but think of neural networks when looking at this App; in this case, the front end is clean and easy, and the underlying framework is established, but more data must be entered and associations formed before itcan comprehensively perform the task.

Maybe I’m using it incorrectly, or I’ve missed the mark, but I’m what I think is an average user – someone with a bit of programming experience, who regularly uses medical Apps, and who knows about clinical presentations and diagnostics. If it needs a tutorial to walk you through its use, maybe it wasn’t meant for the user-friendly iPhone. I don’t think the claim on the website – that “the operation is intuitive” is fair.

Set your expectations carefully; this isn’t a wizard to replace your clinical reasoning. However, it may help expand your differentials and serve as a reference for a wide range of clinical considerations. There’s lots of room for improvement with future iterations.

Software: STATworkUP version 1.04
Manufacturer: IatroCom (statworkup.com)
Cost: 24.99$ USD Availability: iTunes Store
Basic Connectivity: no subscription or Internet required once installed
Best for: Clinicians who want to broaden their differentials, residents and medical students who need a quick reference for obscure tests

Jessica Otte is a guest writer on iMedicalApps.com, and blogs at Dr. Ottematic

Related Posts: