To our readers:

We will be providing commentary and short reviews to medpagetoday.com two or three times a month.  We feel honored to be included in their short list of talented and well respected bloggers.  The following is a little clip from our first post titled, Optimizing Your Medical Practice Experience with the iPod Touch. Rest assured, we’ll keep the frequency of our posts and reviews the same on our site.

There has been a great deal of commentary profiling medical applications that are useful for healthcare providers. However, there hasn’t been much talk about how mobile medical applications can enhance the doctor-patient experience and in turn, help optimize your practice’s overall experience. In future posts, we’ll focus more on applications for medical providers, but this post will discuss applications centered around the physician-patient relationship.   

 

We all know how busy clinic can be, and this leads to increased waiting times for patients.   Understandably, patients often complain that this is the most frustrating time for them, and none of us likes walking in excessively late on an angry patient because we had to deal with another patient’s medical emergency. So how can this downtime be made more bearable and productive at the same time? 

 

Here is where the iPod Touch comes in.  It runs basically the same operating system as the iPhone, and the applications I’ll discuss work for both devices. 

 

During a patient’s waiting time in the waiting room or exam room, you could give them an iPod Touch with some of the following applications pre-loaded. 

The Merck manual is a venerable encyclopedia of medicine that, over the last century, has passed through eighteen editions and attained the generous girth of over 3000 pages. It has such a breadth of scope that, if similar a book were proposed to a publisher today, it would be quickly dismissed as unrealistically ambitious and lacking a clear audience.

However, by encompassing so many clinical and related topics and by virtue of its consistent, tightly honed writing style, it has paradoxically become useful to a large range of readers, including doctors, lawyers and, more recently with its home edition, to lay readers.

Seeking to expand the audience even further, the publishers have now produced an iPhone version of this textbook, which this review will cover.

Continue reading this entry »

1)PalmDoc.net has a great review on an app to help you train for performing lumbar punctures. The last app we reviewed, Procedures Consult-Internal Medicine, also has an excellent example of how to perform lumbar punctures. But the beauty of the Lumbar Puncture app is it’s only $1.99, as compared to the $40 for Procedures Consult. Procedures Consult consult packs 25 different procedures, so if you just need something for Lumbar Punctures, check out the LP Procedures app instead.

2) Merck Manual just released another iPhone app called Home Edition & Procedures, and it’s been getting some buzz on the internet. The app is supposed to provide quick and easy medical knowledge for patients. A CNET author goes far enough to say it will help save on co-pays and "countless" visits to the doctor, we’re not sure if we’d go that far. We’re gonna try to get a copy of the app for a review. Here is the CNET article. Melodika.net has a writeup on this app as well.