Move over Epocrates, Pepid, Skyscape, and LexiComp — the first big player to offer medical apps on Windows Phone 7 devices is Unbound Medicine.  Although not all of their medical apps have made their way to the brand new operating system platform, they have brought nine key medical apps to the Windows Phone Marketplace:

Nursing Central, 5-Minute Clinical Consult, Diagnosaurus, Nurses’ Handbook of Health Assessment, The Merck Manual, Family Drug Guide, Relief Central, Taber’s Medical Dictionary, and Davis’s Drug Guide [We have reviewed the iPhone versions of some of these apps].

Incidentally, the first app ever reviewed on iMedicalApps was the differential diagnosis app by Unbound Medicine – Diagnosaurus Ddx, still one of our favorite medical apps.

So far the other big players in the mobile medical ecosystem — Epocrates, Pepid, Skyscape, and LexiComp have not released any apps for the new Windows Phone 7 platform.  Unbound Medicine’s bold foray to be the first in the space should pay dividends due to the lack of medical reference apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Their entrance into the ecosystem should also reassure physicians thinking of purchasing Windows Phone 7 devices — drug reference apps will be available for point of care use. 

Just one week ago we did a post highlighting the lack of medical apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace.  We interviewed Evan Schoenberg, the physician developer of Med Mnemonics, a popular iPhone medical app that has been ported over to Windows Phone 7.

In our interview, Schoenberg had positive things to say about he Windows Phone 7′s (WP7) user interface and the innovation occurring with the overall operating system. Of note, app fragmentation — the inability to run the same version of an app on all phones, a problem that has plagued Android devices — is an issue Microsoft appears to have understood, and they are strictly controlling hardware specifications and OS releases so this isn’t an issue with WP7 devices.

Hopefully this is something they can stick by because Windows Phone 7′s streamlined user interface definitely has potential to make waves in the medical community.  But unfortunately, with Microsoft’s muddled mobile history, one can only hope they don’t drop the ball this time around.

The full list of medical apps released by Unbound Medicine for Windows Phone 7 devices can be found here:

http://www.unboundmedicine.com/products/windows_phone

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. Of note: These apps will only be great on the iPad if the developers port them over – basically, if the developers make a custom version of the app for the iPad.

(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]

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.

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.

[itunes]

[website]

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.

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.