Calculate risk of stroke on Apple Watch for patients

Review of NIH Score & rt-PA checklist for Apple Watch

When I recently wrote about medical apps physicians wanted to utilize on Apple Watch, I included a wide range of categories, but specifically left out medical calculator apps because I felt the screen size would be too difficult to input numbers and data.

However, there are a few clever medical calculator apps that have emerged for the Apple Watch, and the one I’ll review right now is NIH Score & rt-PA checklist.

The Apple Watch version of the app has the following key features:

•  TPA dosing
• “Time Manager”
• ABCD2 Score
• CHA2DS2 VASc Score

TPA dosing:

The app asks for the patient’s weight in Kg, and then gives you the dosing information for TPA. Obviously, you should check with your own pharmacist when determining final dosing to make sure everything is correct because of how serious TPA administration is.

The interesting part of the TPA dosing portion is how you enter a patient’s weight. Since you can’t enter numerical values, the app uses sets of 10, and then uses the plus and minus icons to let you get exact numbers — really cool.

The more useful parts of the app are the ABCD2 Score and CHA2DS2 Vasc Score calculators.

ABCD2 Score & CHA2DS2 Vasc Score calculators:

These are arguably the most common stroke risk stratifying scores utilized in medicine currently.

ABCD2 score is utilized to help risk stratify patients presenting with TIA symptoms and how likely they are to suffer a subsequent stroke.

Below are screen shots that show how easy it is to utilize the risk stratification score on the Apple Watch:

CHA2DS2 Vasc Score is a risk stratifying tool used to help determine the one year risk of a TE event in a non-anticoagulated patient with non-valvular atrial fibrillation.

Screenshots below: