Essential Pediatric apps for Pediatricians

The following is a list of essential medical apps Pediatrics providers should have on their smartphones. Links to iPhone and Android platforms are provided for each app. The apps are listed based on my experiences working as a full scope Family Medicine physician including obstetrics and pediatrics as well as the app reviews that have been done previously at iMedicalApps.

A summary video is presented below of the pediatric apps mentioned, as well as a full text version of the essential apps we have identified.

Login to iMedicalApps in order to view the following video review of The Essential Medical Apps for Pediatrics. Registration for iMedicalApps is free, or you can continue to read the full text version of the list.

1) Red Book or Nelson’s plus Pneumonia and iGuideline

The Johns Hopkins ABX guide is my go-to “bug” guide, but it doesn’t include pediatric infectious disease recommendations. The “gold standards” for pediatric infectious disease topics are the AAP Red Book and Nelson’s Pediatric Antimicrobial Therapy. Both contain valuable information, but each has significant drawbacks. The Red Book is quite expensive for a standalone app if you are not an AAP member, especially since much of its information could be found in UpToDate and/or Dynamed. If you subscribe to Pediatrics Care Online, you can access the Red Book. The key with many of the AAP publications is to ensure you are a dues paying member as this permits access to many of their publications for free. We reviewed the Red Book previously and found it to be a useful “replacement” for the otherwise hefty AAP text. The cheaper Nelson’s lacks the texbook like feel of the Red Book, but is hindered by an extremely clunky user interface. We reviewed it on iMedicalApps and really couldn’t strongly recommend it. Two related infectious disease apps are Pneumonia and iGuideline. Pneumonia is a free app from Joshua Steinberg that includes both adult and pediatric pneumonia guidelines. iGuideline is a free collection of guidelines including pneumonia and fever without source among others developed by a children’s hospital in Kansas City.