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Top 5 Medical Apps for the Upcoming iPad [Health Care Professionals Edition]

Satish Misra, MD — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:20:30 +0000

Apple has made it clear that current iPhone apps will run on the iPad. For many of the medical apps we’ve reviewed, its welcome news, but it won’t make the user experience of these apps any different. However, there are a few medical apps currently on the iPhone whose user experience should be greatly enhanced by the iPad’s 9.7 inch 1024 x 768 pixel display.

The following are the top 5 medical apps we’re excited to see in action on the iPad. This list is focused for health care professionals, and stay tuned for another list for medical students.

(1) Blausen Human Atlas – When I think of the iPad in medicine, this app embodies one area in which the iPad could shine. The Blausen Human Atlas includes 3D figures of human anatomy, an expansive medical glossary, over 1,000 still images, and a library of videos explaining common medical conditions like GERD and osteoarthritis.

Basically, everything in this app is designed with the goal of improving patient-physician communication. A provider who is trying to explain cholecystitis to a patient could access videos that explain the disease, still images to clarify any confusing points, and even 3D figures of GI anatomy to explain the corrective surgery. The app performs admirably on the iPhone’s 3.5 inch display, but on a display more than twice this size – the iPad’s – it should shine.

Links: Blausen Human Atlas App Review
[iTunes Link]

(2) Visual Dx Mobile – This recently released app aims to be much more than a reference tool for dermatologic disease, aiming to be a point-of-care decision support tool when it comes to skin lesions. Perhaps I’m partial to it because rashes are the bane of my existence, but this app condenses an enormous library of information into a novel format – the “visual differential diagnosis.” And that is what I would love to see on the iPad – large, high-resolution images that would help me distinguish herpes zoster from dermatitis herpetiformis or chancroid from LGV.

Or, similar to the Blausen Human Atlas app, I could use the “Find a Diagnosis” function and use the information and images for melanoma to show a high-risk patient what he or she needs to be looking for. Again, the interactive and fluid user interface could only help enhance the communication between myself and my patients.

Links: Visual Dx Mobile App Review
[iTunes Link]

(3) Procedures Consult from Modality, are a series of apps that provide the user with extensive information on a number of procedures. With apps geared towards Internal Medicine, Family Practice, Ob/Gyn, and a number of other specialties, this family of apps has something for most specialties.

The highlights of these apps are the fantastic video tutorials complete with a narrator, interspersed still images to highlight key learning points, and integrated “clinical pearls.” There are even post-procedure videos that highlight things like how to submit pleural fluid to the lab.

The Procedures Consult series was clearly designed with the learner in mind. And as good as these videos are on the iPhone, they will be even better on the iPad – I can’t stress enough how helpful it will be to see, say, an LP on the iPad screen vs. the iPhone screen. And another big plus for these apps is that all videos are stored locally on your device, a crucial feature in the hospital or even rural clinics where internet access may be iffy.

Links: Procedures Consult – Internal Medicine review, Procedures Consult – Family Medicine review, Procedures Consult – Musculoskeletal review
iTunes Links: Internal Medicine Procedures, Musculoskeletal Procedures, Family Medicine Procedures

(4) OsiriX or eFilm – When the iPhone first came out, the image that most blew me away was the display of radiology imaging on a phone. These are the apps that make it happen and its probably not a surprise to anyone to see them on the list. The ability to access the brain MRI, ordered to rule-out a stroke from my call room at 3am (saving me a trip to a radiology viewing station), sounds great.

To view them on the beautiful high-resolution screen of the iPad will be even better. And the capacitive touch screen means I can manipulate these images and, hopefully soon, even annotate them or send messages to the radiologist asking about a strange incidental finding.

Last year OsiriX was used in a study to accurately diagnose acute appendicitis using the iPhone – showing huge potential for these apps.

Links: OsiriX App Review
[iTunes Link]

(5) Papers – This award winning medical app allows you to easily view research papers, and allows your to put all of your literature into mobile form. One of the biggest knocks on the iPhone is how its difficult to read pdf files due to limitations of screen size. The Papers app does a remarkable job of optimizing PDF viewing capability on the iPhone, and this same functionality will only enhance the user experience on the iPad.

Links: Papers App Review
[iTunes Link]

Other Noteable Medical apps worth mentioning:

*Merck Manual Professional Edition

*Epocrates Electronic Health Record

Iltifat Husain contributed to this post

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Optimizing Your Medical Practice Experience with the iPod Touch

Iltifat Husain — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:38:02 +0000

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.

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The Merck Manual Professional Edition Medical App is the First Encyclopedia of Medicine that Fits in Your Pocket [App Review]

Felasfa Wodajo, MD — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:32:00 +0000

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.

The Merck Manual Professional Edition is a pedestrian representation of the full text, but, it easily succeeds in making the immense amount of information easily accessible. And, for about half the price of the text (and, even better, a far smaller fraction of the weight), it is indeed a very useful addition to the iPhone medical library of most physicians and residents. Nevertheless, the manual is generally addressed to the clinician with limited knowledge of any given subject matter and should not be considered a substitute for specific subject-matter textbooks.

What I liked about this app:

an enormous amount of diagnostic and therapeutic information in your pocket – pretty amazing
a clear writing style that avoids excessive detail
topics that extend into statistics, medico-legal and even medical economics
hyperlinks within the text to other sections (with a back button to return) that aid comprehension
a clean and unobtrusive user interface

What I did not like about this app:

display of graphics and tables is occasionally awkward
keyword searches only identify articles, not the specific section or words

What I would like to see in future versions:

links for further reading on a topic and more images would be very helpful, although the absence probably reflects the original text
a “physician’s” lay version where specific sections can be clipped and printed (with attribution) to give to patients would be a nice feature

Conclusion:

The Merck Manual Professional Edition iPhone app is a clean and efficient implementation of a time-tested medical encyclopedia. Many clinicians will no doubt feel that the relatively brief descriptions of complex medical conditions is at odds with their specialized, in-depth knowledge. Over time, of course, this easy confidence is little match for the real-world variety of patients that walk in the door. Perhaps this is why the manual has succeeded over so many generations. It will be interesting to observe how the Manual fares in this era of information super abundance.

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Dr. Wodajo is a guest contributor to the medical app review team and we feel privileged to have him on board. He brings an extensive clinical background to the reviews. His blog can be found at http://www.orthoonc.com.

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Lumbar Puncture Procedures App Review & Merck Manual – Home Edition App News

Iltifat Husain — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:42:00 +0000

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.

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