Provider Apps
Campbell’s Operative Orthopedics App for the iPhone: What Every Orthopedic Surgeon Wants [App Review]
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.
MedPage Today Mobile App Puts Breaking Medical News in the Palm of Your Hand [App Review]
MedPage Today’s motto is, “Putting Breaking Medical News Into Practice”. I’ve been a fan of the website, medpagetoday.com for a few years now because they provide great medical commentary in a short, concise manner. I call it “high-yield” reading. Their articles often highlight key papers from the New England Journal or other reputed journals. Another reason I’m a fan is because of their partnership with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine to provide Continuing Medical Education(CME). A partnership with a well respected academic institution definitely gives me greater respect for their articles.
All the content from their website has now been brought to the iPhone platform, and the app is free! Although the application was released awhile back, it was recently updated with some nice additions. In this review of the MedPage Today Mobile App I’ll cover how to best utilize the features this free application provides.
Optimizing Your Medical Practice Experience with the iPod Touch
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.
FDA Drugs App Provides a Mobile Interface to FDA Drug Approval Data [App Review]
FDA Drugs is an iPhone application that functions as a mobile drug database. The user selects a drug and the application exposes brand and generic equivalent drug information, with the added twist of being able to display the actual FDA approval document.
The name is unfortunate as it implies that the application was developed by the FDA, which it is not. Rather, the developers draw on publicly available FDA data stores to display the label information for thousands of FDA approved prescription and over-the-counter drugs. When the label information is not stored inside the application, it displays a NIH website (“Daily Med”) where the user can search for FDA label information.
Three Free Useful iPhone Medical Apps [Recently Released]
Free medical applications for the iPhone are being released on a daily basis, but not all of them are useful. This isn’t a surprise since they are after all free to download. However, there are definitely some free medical applications worth downloading.
This will be a regular column on iMedicalApps.com, where we will periodically post commentary on recently released free medical apps that are actually useful from a physician, medical student, or any other healthcare providers’ perspective.
In this post I’ll focus on three free medical applications related to the following: clinical trials, Framingham scale, and a radiology teaching app.
iCME is a Simple and Useful Application to Track CME Hours, but the Competition is Even Simpler [App Review]
iCME is a simple mobile database for physicians to track CME (continuing medical education) events. Appreciating its purpose is clouded at first since it doesn’t seem obvious that keeping a list of one’s conferences is weighty enough of a task to devote an entire application. But, it turns out, that is indeed the one and only function of the application. Specifically, the user is asked to manually enter the date, title and hours of every CME event attended and, in return, the user is rewarded with a display of all their events in table format. As every physician needs to document continuing medical education at each biennial state license renewal, the need for recording such events certainly exists. However, the question is whether a dedicated smartphone application beats a simple piece of paper.
Need to run a code? There’s an app for that! ACLS Advisor [App Review]
There are few moments in medicine where your immediate actions lead to a direct, life altering result for your patient. Obstructed airways and anaphylactic reactions come to mind, but neither of those occur as often as a code (“code blue”, and I’m not talking about when the cold activated indicator on your beer lets you know it’s ready to drink).
Back in medical school, before we entered the wards 3rd year, our school made sure we were ACLS certified. I realized how lucky I was that my school taught such a rigorous ACLS course when I was doing an away rotation at another medical school and students were complaining about their lack of ACLS training. Enter the “ACLS Advisor – Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support” App (currently $5.99 in the App Store) from Current Clinical Strategies Publishing. This review will cover how this well organized and easy to use application walks you though various ACLS algorithms and then some.
The Merck Manual Professional Edition Medical App is the First Encyclopedia of Medicine that Fits in Your Pocket [App Review]
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.
ReachMD Broadcasting First Live Interactive CME/CE Program on November 16th, Listen In On Your iPhone
We’ve always been a big fan of Medical Radio, the free iPhone app from the folks over at ReachMD. The app is in our top 7 list of medical applications because of the great utility it provides to medical professionals. We actually reviewed an old version of this application, ReachMD CME awhile back. You can find out more information about this live event on the ReachMD site:
“This represents the first national broadcast of it’s kind for continuing medical education where participants can interact with the world renown faculty that NACCME has lined up for this program,” said Gary Epstein, CEO of ReachMD. “ReachMD is proud to continue to deliver innovation in the Medical Education media space and we expect this new live programming to generate as much enthusiasm as our iPhone application last year.”
This event isn’t a one time thing, and will occur eight times from November 16th to December 15th. The schedule of the live events is listed on their website.
You can participate and ask questions during the live broadcast via phone(888-MD1-REACH), email (CME@ReachMD.com), and twitter(CMEonReachMD). Participation in the event is free, just like the application.
Here is an excerpt of what we wrote in the past about the Medical Radio app by ReachMD:
We thought the ReachMD CME app had promise, but didn’t capitalize on it’s full potential. Needless to say, the Medical Radio app definitely does not disappoint. This app provides an easy way for you to get CME credit by listening to streaming CME education from legitimate health care professionals, and then taking quizzes right through your phone. Imagine getting CME credit while on a train ride or in some waiting line. Imagine no more.
The iTunes link to the Medical Radio application can be found here.
