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

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Campbell’s Operative Orthopedics is a cornerstone of any orthopedic surgeon’s library. It’s one of the few volumes that every resident knows he or she will have to own – no point complaining about the price. If a junior resident shows up to do a case and has not at least read the requisite chapter in Campbell’s, then they should be prepared to go no further than a few hours of holding retractors for the attending and making idle chit-chat.

So, the arrival of an iPhone version of this four volume tome is certainly an important milestone. How did they do? This full review will explain.

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The challenge of identifying and absorbing relevant medical literature will not abate anytime soon and the proliferation of services that purport to simplify or eliminate this problem for physicians is itself now becoming a distraction. The rapid adoption of web-enabled smart phones by physicians, such as the iPhone, is driving this dilemma from the theoretical realm directly to the bedside. The hope is that if relevant medical literature is immediately available at the point of care, physicians would be more inclined to use it.

At the same time, the mantra of practicing medicine that is evidence-based is ringing ever louder. Thus far, it seems to this reviewer that most physicians apply it most strenuously when criticizing other physicians’ decisions rather than applying it to their own practice. Nevertheless, large well-respected compilations like the Cochrane Abstracts are available and widely used.  They offer well constructed summaries of evidence-based diagnostic and treatment guidelines for thousands of pathologies.  It is into this nexus that the “Evidence Central” app enters.  This review will cover the features of this recently released medical application, which is technically “free” in the App Store, but requires a paid subscription of $79.95 in order to actually use.

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If one wanted to get an idea of the potential of the iPhone as a tool for bedside medical and surgical education, this application by Modality and Elsevier would be a good starting place to get inspired. While it seems obvious that a portable device with a great user interface, a sophisticated operating system and great multimedia features should be a shoe-in for portable medical education, what is equally true is that the critical ingredient remains great instructional content.

“Procedures Consult: Internal Medicine – Musculoskeletal” brings together a highly detailed review of orthopedic bedside procedures, such as aspiration of small and large joints, splint application and reduction of joint dislocations, with a well crafted user interface to create an application that will genuinely be useful for emergency room physicians and junior orthopedic residents.  This review will cover how this medical application for the iPhone and iPod Touch goes about teaching these procedures.

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Procedure apps appear to be all the rage lately in the mobile medical world, and rightfully so. These instructional apps are a valuable resource to those learning how to do procedures in the health care world. We reviewed another Procedures app recently, Procedures Consult-Internal Medicine, that covers a wide variety of procedures. However, this app focuses on one specific procedure, and is a fraction of the cost.

Procedures – Subclavian Line, is a $2.99 app produced by MeisterMed. You might remember one of our previous reviews on a MeisterMed app, PediDoser. We weren’t huge fans of that app (although to their credit, PediDoser has a 3.5 star rating in the App Store). Nonetheless, once I tried out this current app for this review I was definitely impressed.

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