At the internal medicine conference I am attending there are a number of vendor displays. Subspecialty conferences usually have displays from pharmaceutical companies, device makers etc that are used in their practices. At my conferences usually it is textbook publishers (they are still printing them on paper! And they are too heavy to carry home….hmmm, is there a better way?). That reminds me that what generalists do is manage information, huge amounts of information. The number of research articles published daily is astounding and the flow of clinical information (my electronic inbasket) can be overwhelming.
Dan Diamond, MD says in a recent article, that he wouldn’t go to work without his iphone. I wouldn’t either. The electronic health record provides structured information and lots of it including reminders and prompts. It provides links to information resources and libraries, but there is nothing like having all that information in the palm of your hand. I could no longer get along without my iphone.
At the conference I am attending, I question some of the data presented about a diabetes topic- in seconds I have the original article in front of me… on my iphone.
My iphone has the usual stuff. Contacts list, email, schedule etc. Yes, it also can be a phone!
But there is so much more. There are over 278 medical applications at the itunes application store for iphone amongst over 25,000 applications. I have 65 applications on my iphone currently- not to mention a lot of music, photos, and a few movies.
Calculators: Medcalc does over 40 common medical computations- such as calculating heart disease risk based on patient characteristics. Formularies: Epocrates gives me HealthPartners and other healthplan formulary specific information including dosing, adverse effects, interactions, pricing, pictures of pills. Images: Netter drawings of anatomical parts, and corresponding radiology images. Text books- I have a couple, You could carry a medical library, and they can be purchased and downloaded in seconds via Kindle for iphone (and these would synchronize to my Kindle, if I had one). Web browsing and Google- I can look up journal articles pretty fast. GPS/map functions- this has gotten me to a meeting on the other side of town a couple of times- even pointing out current traffic snarls to avoid. Podcasts: I listen to journal articles- Annals of Internal Medicine, PubMed from the National Library of Medicine and others when I exercise. I have a few medical lectures. Video instruction- I can easily access youtube based videos demonstrating how to examine the shoulder if I need a quick refresher.
As a patient, I can, from anywhere, log on to HealthPartners patient portal and look up stuff in my medical record- cut my finger in Calcutta?- I can look up date of my last tetanus shot. WebMD has a nice patient reference application.
One of my favorite applications for iphone is Shazam. A song is playing while I am sitting in a restaurant- hmm, what is it? Shazam listens to the song, and identifies it including artist and album! Now if I could just put my iphone on the chest of my patient and have it identify the heart murmur??? I’ll check the app store.
John Butler, MD
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But is there an app for testing vision (like a near card) ?
Whenever a vision should be checked with a patient, there seems to always be a stricking absence of vision-recording posters or cards. And of course as an ophthalmologist, vision is the vital sign of the eye !
Yes, actually a couple of choices! …plus color blindness tests, fixating, amsler grid etc. Also there are calculators for diopters and things I don’t understand.
JB
Wow the more I use the iPhone the more stuff there is to do with it, and useful things at that. I’m a HealthPartners member and this was a very helpful post. Thanks
Wish I knew about it during my Kidney Stones last Fall, ouch!