7 new apps for physicians to try

From guidelines for cancer patients to neurosurgery simulation, these medical apps for doctors help in treatment and practice decisions.

Usually, I use Tech Notes to cover three recently released apps in depth. But over the last few months, we’ve seen a flurry of interesting medical apps released. This time, instead of discussing three apps in detail, I’ll give you a summary of seven interesting, free medical apps that were released in the last few months.

1. Dx Challenge

Dx Challenge, from the University of Pennsylvania, gives you a case-based presentation of a patient and tests your responses. You have a limited amount of time to respond to the questions and a limited number of attempts.

The interesting thing about the app is that you actually can collect an honorarium for getting the answers right. The challenges and cases are live and only available for a limited time. This is the only medical app I know of that actually pays you for getting medical questions correct.

2. CorticoCalc

The CorticoCalc app helps you determine the appropriate topical steroid and coverage. The app would be useful not only for dermatologists but also for pediatricians and primary care physicians. One of the best features of this app is the ability to separate pediatric cases from adult ones—there is a separate decision tree for patients 0- to 3-years-old and those who are older.

Once you select the appropriate age, the app guides you through selecting the amount of coverage, such as right arm, and then gives steroid recommendations.

3. ASCO Guidelines

The ASCO Guidelines app from the American Society of Clinical Oncology helps clinicians with a range of management questions and treatment guidelines for their cancer patients. The app has point-of-care decision-making tools and is kept up to date when new evidence becomes available.

4. Prescription Check by Warby Parker

Warby Parker makes it clear their technology isn’t meant to replace visits to your eye doctor, but you can imagine medical professionals are concerned.

The American Optometric Association (AOA) has submitted complaints about this technology to the FDA, and they are concerned that this type of technology will lead to harm by causing fewer patients to get medical eye screening exams.

The main reason I mention this medical app is that these types of eye prescription apps are gaining traction, and the technology itself is innovative. As medical professionals, we should know that we might have patients using these types of apps and should be ready to answer questions that patients have about their safety and use.

5. PsychoPharm Research

PsychoPharm Research was created by noted medical app developer Joongheum Park, M.D., who is an internal medical physician. Park has created several notable medical apps, and this current one provides an interactive version of medical decision support trees for psychopharmacology.

It should be noted that medication decision support trees have backing from a venerable institution. They are developed by the Psychopharmacology Algorithm Project at the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry, South Shore Program (founded by David Osser, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School).

This application really is tremendous. It helps primary care physicians and psychiatrists with a decision tree for patients who have depression, bipolar and other psychiatric complaints that haven’t responded to the first line of therapy.

It’s a must-have for primary care physicians to try, especially when choosing second line options for patients who have depression or general anxiety disorders. It’s remarkable that this application is available to download for free.

6. Pterional Craniotomy

Pterional Craniotomy is a real-time 3-D neurosurgery simulation app that shows you one of the most common neurosurgery procedures: the pterional craniotomy.

The app teaches about and enables you to actually perform the surgery. Users are given controls at a granular level, even determining how to position the patient during the surgery by utilizing tap and zoom functions on your phone.

The team of neurosurgeons that helped develop the app state that it was built through “a systematic 3-D reproduction of real surgical scenes.” The app gives you an idea of how future medical students and residents might learn complex surgical procedures by using their phones.

7. REBEL EM

REBEL EM by AgileMD organizes the content from the RebelEM website into easy to use, point-of-care accessible information. RebelEM.com was founded by Salim Rezaie, M.D., and is run by a group of academic emergency medicine physicians. The website provides great peer-reviewed blog posts that focus on various emergency medicine topics.

Instead of simply turning the website into an app, AgileMD divided the app into key systems, such as cardiovascular and gastroenterology. Within each of these sections, you’re given summary morsels of information.

My only issue with the app is that I wish they put links to the full posts on each of the subsections for further reading. That said, this is a great example of distilling a website into an easy to use, point-of-care form.

Iltifat Husain, M.D., is editor-in-chief and founder of iMedicalApps.com, the leading physician publication on digital medicine. He’s also assistant professor of emergency medicine and director of medical app curriculum at Wake Forest School of Medicine.