The days of Star Trek’s medical tricorder coming into reality are years-past: In many respects, you can pick up such a device at any mobile phone retailer…
Just download the following programs to your iPhone (or, in many cases, your Palm or Blackberry) and you’ve got a powerful, well-rounded digital-utility-belt for fighting any number of health conditions…
Diagnosis
iTriage
Cost: $0.99
download: http://www.healthagen.com/
Inputting theoretical symptoms or that of a patient into this app will return relevant diseases and treatments as search results. The app also allows you to narrow-down “possible causes” for a quick second-opinion to professional diagnosis. iTriage could be used as a quick basic reference for doctors, nurses, or medical students in the field, but is also intended for use as an initial diagnosis tool for the public.
MedCodes-09
cost: $99.99
download: http://www.zipchart.com/medcodes/
Look it up all in one place now: MedCodes-09 contains the complete 2009 medical database for ICD-9, CPT and HCPS codes, along with Global periods for CPT from the American Medical Association for all medical specialties.
Searches can be performed using single words, multiple words or just fragments.
Calculations
MedCalc
cost: Free
download: http://medicaliphone.blogspot.com/2008/09/medcalc-medical-calculator-for-iphone.html
This free app is more than just a standard calculator, boasting a wide selection of formulas and scores, support for U.S. and S.I. units, bibliographic references for formulas, and searchable equations by name or keywords. According to one review, MedCalc is primarily intended for physicians and health care professionals “who, for-example, need the formula for the Rule of Six, or Absolute Neutrophil Count.”
Reference
Medical Encyclopedia
cost: $39.99
download: http://www.umm.edu/ency/
A vast resource, providing more than 50,000 pages of in-depth medically reviewed information for nine different medical categories including: symptoms, disease, injury, surgery, nutrition, poison, and tests, as well as various YouTube videos. Published by the University of Maryland, this indispensible interactive reference is available in English and Spanish.
PubMed On Tap
cost: Free-$2.99
download: http://referencesontap.com/
This app for lets healthcare professionals search through entries on the medical article portal PubMed. Users can e-mail the results as formatted text or RIS-tagged records, and access their most recent searches.
The app also comes in a free “Lite” version that limits the user to five records returned per search.
Drug reference and cross-reference
Epocrates
cost: Free
download: http://www.epocrates.com/
With the same device on which they take calls and listen to music, doctors and nurses can now connect with thousands of pieces of drug information, such as doses, adverse reactions, formularies, pricing, and images to identify pills by.
Epocrates can check interactions for up to 30 drugs at a time and includes a number of useful add-on medical tools, such as a mobile Body Mass Index calculator and a Glomerular Filtration Rate (GFR) calculator to measure stages of kidney disease.
Treatment
Epocrates Pro
cost: $99-199
download: http://www.epocrates.com/
Medical professionals can also upgrade to a premium treatment-specific version of Epocrates, which provides access to in-depth, peer-reviewed medical research content ranging from reports on diseases, to infectious disease treatment guides, to references on lab tests, and information on herbal and over-the-counter remedies.
Records and patient-management
iChart EMR
cost: $139.99
download: http://www.caretools.com/
Imagine a “complete mobile Electronic Medical Record system” that doctors and other health care professionals can house on their personal iPhones to track and manage a patent’s information throughout treatment. Some of the features of iChart EMR include the ability to track labs and studies, write SOAP and Procedure notes, look up (and capture) CPT4 and ICD9 codes, and sync data to an online data center.
Self-improvement
ReachMD CME
cost: Free
download: http://www.reachmd.com
For doctors-on-the-go with little time, who want to earn Continuing Medical Education credits: Download this app and you’re off to listen to credit-programs and take the corresponding CME test from your iPhone, whenever you have a minute…
SleepER
cost: $0.99
download: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=291794758&mt=8
Indispensible for doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners doing shift work. SleepER estimates users’ cognitive effectiveness as a percent of when they’re fully rested. By asking you a series of questions, this app can show you how much your lack of sleep is impacting your performance, translating the information into an equivalent Blood Alcohol Concentration. Using such software to check BAC Equivalence could be a controversial new way to monitor (or self-monitor) how capable medical professionals are during back-to-back shifts or lengthy procedures.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
We desperately need an app tailored to healthcare workers that enables us to track our time worked. It needs to show breaks, overtime, & notes for shifts. Needs to show a bi-weekly total for hours to syc with pay periods. If it had a calendar to input our schedule, it would be perfect!!!
KH,
Indeed, that sounds like it would be quite useful!
One important app not mentioned here is Voalté One. This app combines voice alarm and text functions onto the iPhone platform and delivers them at the point of care. It allows caregivers (re:nurses) to spend less time hunting and gathering information and more time doing providing patient care.
It would be interesting to know how many of these apps qualify as Med-Tech and therefore require various certifications in order to be used in a clinical situation. In Europe, med-tech software must now be CE-certified.
It’s great to see that the market for such tools is growing though.
Anger management is one which can help you manage your anger out of control the state of psychological techniques. Anger management the most important technology is to take a deep breath only.
For KH: I have a custom application which I wrote for visiting nurses which tracks hours worked and overtime at different facilities for two week and user defined time periods. It will feed data into a payroll module. But this is not an iphone app, it runs on a PC.