by Jay Luxenberg, MD

A few months back, we highlighted some apps that aren’t specifically medical, but are incredibly useful in a medical practice. This month I’d like to talk about a few apps that actually are targeted to us.

I’m sure everyone with a smartphone, PDA (assuming PDAs are still in use at all) or tablet uses at least one and probably several apps to access news. We are all interested in what is happening in the world. As medical folk, though, we have more specific interests that are poorly served in the general news media. For example, those of us in the long-term care world in California are desperate for accurate and timely information on the state budget process and the impact of the recent cuts on various programs serving the elderly. Although the general newspapers and news sites have some of this information, it takes searching and the articles are often general rather than containing the specific information (and dare I say it – gossip) that we crave. That is where the California Healthline app comes in. California Healthline is published by the California Healthcare Foundation. California Healthline itself is a website that is updated frequently and one can follow them on Twitter or Facebook, or your favorite RSS newsreader (more on those in a future article) but I prefer their app. It’s currently available for the iPhone and iPad. It allows you to store recent news content directly on your device for offline reading, for times you are off the internet, so you can even read it on an airplane. The app is free of charge and free of advertisements. I haven’t noticed any particular evident problems with interpretation of news, but of course your mileage may vary. I hope it soon becomes available for other platforms, particularly the fast growing Android platform.

What about medical news? I’m sure we each have our favorites, and I’ll share mine. For me, it’s easy to decide which apps I use the most – they find their way to the first page on my phone and iPad. Medscape seems to always reside there. It has many functions helpful for medical use, but today I am talking about the “news” function. Medscape has a “Medscape Today” function reached by clicking on “news”, which brings you to news from several wire services as well as Medscape’s parent company, WebMD. Medscape is available for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Android. Once you have it – explore the rest of the app as well. You will be amazed at all the useful information it has. There are more than 4000 clinical reference articles, available off-line. There is access to more than 2500 medical images and 150 videos. It essentially serves as a portable textbook. You can be stranded on a ski lift for 10 hours and end up knowing more medicine than your old chief of service. It also serves as an excellent drug reference, much like Epocrates. It has good coverage of herbal treatments and vitamins as well. It has a nice drug interaction checker. I am not sure why, but Epocrates is behind the times in supporting the iPad’s screen resolution, and I find myself using Medscape instead most of the time.

Speaking of Epocrates, one of the initial developers of Epocrates has a new app that I have been having fun with. It is called Doximity, and it’s available for iPhone and Android so far. It is free, and after signing up it almost magically (or perhaps symptomatic of the loss of privacy associated with a career in medicine) it finds all the folks you went to medical school and the folks you trained with in residency. Find out what specialties they chose, and where they are living. See if any have addresses in jails or prisons. You can download their contact information and set the ones you liked as “colleagues”. Add you consultant network as colleagues, and you can send them encrypted e-mail. It also let’s you look up physicians by specialty nearby or by zip code. Put “90210 plastic” in search and you will have a list of the more than 200 plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills. You can even do special searches like finding physicians that speak a certain language in a particular specialty. Telugu speaking cardiologists, anyone? It also has the phone numbers of medical students – handy for when you will be late to attending rounds. The app also finds and gives you phone numbers for your local hospitals, medical facilities and pharmacies. It starts with a map of your vicinity, and with a touch of a button you can identify all the 24-hour pharmacies and touch them to dial. For the other pharmacies it has their hours. Of course, this works for locations other than your local one as well. All-in-all, a very nice start for a relatively new app.

I’ll leave some apps to discuss in future editions of the Wave. Meanwhile, please feel free to suggest your own favorites.