IDdx app review, helps diagnose difficult infectious diseases in patients

Clinical Scenario:

You are seeing a 65 yo female with Type II diabetes who presents with eye pain, knee pain and swelling, and a rash on her arms that began two weeks after returning from a trip to a national park on the east coast. The patient denies knee trauma, but was camping for about one week with her husband in a tent with occasional short hikes on the Appalachian Trail. Let’s take a look at IDdx in action.

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Fever and a rash are common complaints seen in both adults and children in the clinic, ER and inpatient wards. The outbreak of Ebola in West Africa last year made this abundantly clear when the first case of Ebola was diagnosed in an ER in Dallas, TX. This one case sparked debate in the media and all over the internet about whether or not the patient could have been diagnosed earlier. Keeping a broad differential diagnosis is wise with just about any complaint, but can be especially useful when dealing with infectious diseases. Does that patient with a cough in the ER have an upper respiratory infection or pneumonia, community acquired pneumonia or Legionella, or something even worse like Hantavirus or multi-drug resistant TB?

IDdx: Infectious Disease Queries is an app designed to help with these difficult decisions. It functions as a decision support tool that helps to build and at the same time limit the differential diagnosis based on key symptoms and epidemiological data that you enter into the app. It reminds us of VisualDx and Diagnosaurus but for infectious diseases. The app was created by Dr Jay Brown, MD, MPH, a family and occupational medicine physician with an MPH from the University of Washington. He also serves as a consultant for the US National Library of Medicine which may explain the impressive functionality of the app. The programming within the app is very slick and updated frequently based on actual epidemiological data from respected sources such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The app can also be used simply as an infectious disease textbook of sorts in that it contains the same type of information found in other ID apps such as Sanford and Hopkins Abx Guide. The app links to drug treatment where applicable to either CDC or Merck Manual, but is not intended to be a true drug dosing guide. The goal of the app is to aid providers in taking the undifferentiated infectious disease patient and making the proper diagnosis such that patients with highly infectious or simply rare pathogens aren’t missed.

Evidence based medicine

IDdx incorporates the latest edition of Control of Communicable Diseases Manual (CCDM), Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases (PPID), Infectious Diseases (Cohen), Tropical Infectious Diseases (Guerrant), and numerous other sources from CDC to Hopkins Abx Guide. A complete list of references is here.

What providers would benefit from this App?

Students, residents, mid-levels, primary care, emergency medicine, infectious disease, preventive medicine, global health and any provider who sees patients with various infectious diseases.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official policy of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.