Emergency Medicine Physicians diagnose a variety of illnesses and undertake acute interventions to resuscitate and stabilize patients. Currently, there aren’t that many Android apps for Emergency Care providers.
The Critical Medical Guide aims to assist physicians in these scenarios by providing crucial clinical guidelines, emergency medical references and material to use as medical reference when needed.
User Interface
The app’s main screen consists of five tabs that sort the content into Medical, Pharmacology, EKG, RSI, and Pediatrics categories.
Within each of the sections we can find information on things like:
- Critical Care & Course of Action
- Emergency Medicine
- Interactive EKG Movies
- Medical Spanish with Audio
- First Aid Care
- Drug Calculators
- Formulary & Drug Interaction Checking
- Pediatric Advanced Life Support
- Ventilator Management
- Special Procedures, such as CTs and X-rays
- Monitoring Information – Electrocardiograms & IABPs
- Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS)
The amount of useful information crammed into this app is astonishing. The main problem is actually getting to that information. The arbitrary sections don’t make navigating the app any easier because they aren’t clear enough. This is an example of such odd categorization decisions: There is an item titled References which is where we would expect to find references to source materials and yet we find more calculators and medical phrases in Spanish. Among the features of the app we find interesting are video samples of EKG strips, laboratory values, dosing calculators, imaging pictures, capnography videos, and so much more.
Critical Medical Guide suffers from a particularly common problem when developers hurry to launch something for both Android and iOS–a broken UI. This means that sometimes parts of the app respond to the back Android key while others don’t. Sometimes the app expects us to tap a part of the screen that’s not intuitively tappable to get back to the previous screen. In the case of Critical Medical Guide, this lack of consistency is annoying but luckily not a deal breaker.
Evidence and literature used to support app
- The app makes no reference to any source material which is very disappointing. If you include reference material for clinical practice you have to source your information to be taken seriously.
Price
- $9.99
Likes
- Vast amounts of information
- Good educational value
- Videos and images
Dislikes
- User Interface is broken
Healthcare providers that would benefit from the app
- Physicians in general, medical students, etc.
Conclusion
- Critical Medical Guide is a very comprehensive android medical app which aims high, and narrowly misses its target. It seems the developers made a great effort trying to package as much information as possible. However, an intuitive and functional UI is key–having the proper guides serves little purpose if I can’t find them.
- The fact that the app doesn’t include reference to source material is disappointing considering the effort the developers took. Reliable sources let users trust your content.
- Bottom line, Critical Medical Guide packs a ton of information for $10.
Type of device used to review app – Moto X
App version – Play Store says 1.9, App says 1.1
Rating: (1 to 5 stars): 3.5/5
- User interface – 2. It’s hard to navigate and not very intuitive
- Multimedia usage – 4. Plenty of images, sounds and videos
- Price – 4. Contents are great at a very low price point
- Real world applicability –3. Good app for physicians and students in general
