Archive for the ‘All’ Category

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DocGuide, your journal community on the iPhone

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

DocGuide a website that provides individualized insight into the latest updates and literature filtered from over 200 well recognized national and international journals has recently released an iPhone app that allows access to our account on the go.

One of the great features of DocGuide is that subscribers can star an interesting article they have just read which translates into a voting system enabling us to see which articles have shaken the boat recently.

DocGuide is a physician only community in that they check the license of each and every subscriber. This is good in ensuring a pure doctors rating of the articles.

Another great feature of DocGuide App is that it’s highly individualized and tailored to our needs. For example when you choose pediatrics you get to see only those articles that are of interest in pediatrics and even you can segment that into what type of articles you want to see such as pure research, clinical, news and press and others.

Not only that, but you get to choose what journals, diseases, and drugs [see screenshots above] you want to keep an eye on!

The app is free [download in iTunes] and subscription to DocGuide is also free.

The only missing feature from this great journal app is the ability to earn CME credit. Nowadays, it’s hard to convince a physician to read an article on the go without simultaneously earning CME on the fly.

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Posted in All, Free, Journals and Medline Search, News, Pediatric RSS, Updates, and Alerts, iPhone | No Comments »

Don’t let Skyscape fool you!

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Skyscape, the largest medical library for the mobile and the company that we all thrive on when it comes to our handhelds in clinical practice has a puzzling marketing strategy.

I postponed writing about this issue for a while thinking that it’s an error and they’ll will soon rectify it. But even after asking them about it they did not fix it until the time am writing this post.

So let me tell you what is it;

Skyscape first introduced their first native iPhone app “The Skyscape Medical Resources” which is their mother app on which we can install all of their titles.

That app comes free with four resources these are: Archimedes, Outlines in Clinical Medicine [OCM], RxDrugs, and MedAlerts.

Now, if you go to Skyscape Website and check for these resources you’ll find that RxDrugs, and OCM are being sold for and $34 and $23 respectively! Am not talking here about the other platforms [Palm, WM, BB, and others] am talking exactly about the iPhone version.

What’s even funnier is that OCM and RxDrugs are individually being given away for free in the App Store!

I hand checked the versions that you get from the website with those that you get from the App Store and they are exactly the same, I repeat, they are exactly the same.

Moreover, they insisted on this policy and released Skyscape’s Medical Bag which again features trimmed versions of Archimedes 360, and Labs 360 and an exact version of LS 360. All of these are being sold for a total price of over $80 in the Skyscape’s website [click on them above] while in fact you can get them all for only $1.99 from the iTunes App Store!

So dear colleagues, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, Don’t buy those apps that I just mentioned from Skyscape website. Instead get them for free or at a very low price from iTunes.

And if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch; well, this is another good reason to switch!

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Posted in All, Opinions, iPhone | 6 Comments »

New Pediatric iPhone Apps

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

In response to your request we have created a specific Pda4peds page for a list of the recently released pediatric iPhone and iPod Touch apps.

Have a look here http://pda4peds.com/iphone/new

The growth of medical and pediatric apps in app store has been phenomenal and it’s a good idea to have a place where we can monitor and watch for any new interesting pediatric apps as they are released.

Thanks for those who asked for the page and keep your feedback coming so that we can enhance Pda4peds to better serve you.

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Posted in All, Pda4peds News | 3 Comments »

APGARTimer a Smart APGAR Calculator

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Patrick Verloo released his first ever iPhone app and it is an APGAR calculator.

Given the fact there are dozens of Apgar calcs for the iPhone by now one would think this app is not going to add anything. However, there’s something in this app that is not seen in any other Apgar score calculator which is a timer.

It’s a smart idea to start the time once the baby is born so that we know when to record the one minute and five minute Apgar scores, this is really handy. Peds and Neo colleagues keep their eye on the wall mounted clock and then pick out their calculator, now with this app they can have them both in one single interface.

But for a single calc app it’s unlikely to stay resident in out iPhone devices as we appreciate more and more the limited real state we have on the iPhone and so ultimately we will keep those multifunctional apps, like for example keeping Mediquations instead of having a number of single calc apps.

$1.99 seems to be high of an Apgar score, it should be free or at least 99 cents.

Download the APGARTimer from iTunes Store.

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Posted in All, Calculators, Converters, Tools, News | 2 Comments »

Nelson Pocket Book of Pediatric Antimicrobial Therapy

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

The new 2008-2009 edition of the famous little yellow pocket book is out for the PDA and iPhone from Skyscape. Written by the chief editor of the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal and in collaboration with the AAP’s Red Book Committee this reference is certainly an authority when it comes to antibiotics in clinical and community based pediatrics.

See this iPhone video review:

See this Windows Mobile video review:

Most of the contents are presented in table format and unfortunately the Skyscape interface [as well as most other developers] does not really fit those tables into the small PDA screen and so we’d have to scroll side to side to see the whole table which makes navigation rather unpleasant. In addition, the lack of landscape mode of Skyscape titles [as of the time of writing this post] further compounds this issue.

It has everything related to infectious disease pharmacotherapy with drug dosages even in detailed circumstances such as the neonatal patient. For each clinical syndrome there is a list of recommended antibiotics sometimes down to the third line of choice. However, the reverse is not true, we don’t get a list of indications against each antimicrobial. This is something we wish to see in future versions.

References and grading of evidence are not so extensively quoted against each recommendation in the Nelson Pocket Book and this will be accounted for in the future editions as mentioned in the newly published website www.nelsonspocketbook.com.

Some Useful Links

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Posted in All, Infectious Diseases, News | 3 Comments »

The new Red Book 2009

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

The American Academy of Pediatrics has just released the latest 28th edition of the most trusted infectious disease reference, The Red Book 2009.

Concomitantly, it was released from Unbound Medicine for the mobile platforms.

For iPhone/iPod Touch version play this video;

And this time with landscape support;

For the Windows Mobile version play this video;

Unbound Medicine’s Red Book is also compatible with all other platforms including Palm (but not Palm Pre), Blackberry, and even Android.

The AAP book store is offering the same Unbound Medicine Red Book and interestingly at a higher price for non-members!

Skyscape’s and other developers versions will be available in the near future as per the AAP.

Although not as rich as the AAP’s Red Book online, the UM’s web version of the Red Book is offered for free when we subscribe to any of the mobile platforms and so we can access it offline on the handheld and also online on the desktop and wirelessly.

The Red Book is undoubtedly a must-have reference for any pediatrician and we should all upgrade to this latest version, by the way UM provide free upgrade if you’ve been a valid subscriber of the previous version.

It can better

UM’s Red Book is great but still there’s room for improvements;

  • Wish to see images included.
  • Wish to see search history.
  • More linking to external resources.
  • A “what’s new” section would be great.

Also some problems were found in this first iPhone version;

  • There’s a bug in which the home page does not tilt to landscape only after switching to landscape from within the contents.
  • Some links are broken and others are dead as seen here;

However, since this is the first release we expect to see fixes in the near future.

Some useful links

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Posted in All, Infectious Diseases, News, References & ebooks, iPhone | 6 Comments »

Essential Evidence Plus

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

The great evidence based tool, Essential Evidence Plus previously known as infoPOEMs is reviewed on the Pocket PC platform in the following video;

This is a filtered synopsized graded evidence based clinical knowledge database right on our PDA. The content is derived from more than 100 high profile medical journals that are continuously monitored for the latest that matters.

It also include some other tools check out Pda4peds for reviews of the following sections:

What’s great about it, is that it talks in simple language making all those Cochrane reviews easy to read and easy to understand. POEM in fact stands for Patient Oriented Evidence that Matters; it really is. They present the complicated literature articles in a clinical question format answered in the most simplest way.

Targeting primary health care physicians, the app certainly is useful for us pediatricians as we essentially work in a primary care setting.

Free from pharmaceutical companies support makes it independent and free from bias.

The application automatically syncs itself with the desktop as the PDA is connected retrieving the latest updates of the database which is done quite frequently on a monthly basis sometimes.

However, there are some features that can still make the EE+ even greater and here’s a list of suggestions:

  • It would be great to include the daily or monthly infoPOEMs emails in the form of recent updates or what’s new into the app. And perhaps some FDA alerts.
  • The EE+ podcasts would better be included into the application not only on the website.
  • More extensive cross linking among the articles needed
  • An Over the Air update is more convenient than the desktop updater.
  • Intergration with Lexi-Comp & Tarascon is great but how about more options such as Epocrates or Skyscape.

Like the EE+!  you can vote for it in the Best Evidence Based applications poll.

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Posted in All, Evidence Based Pediatrics | 4 Comments »

Skyscape References on Palm Pre

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Skyscape works on Pre with the Classic thing [motionapps.com/classic].  They have a couple of products set up for that.  I did 5mcc and a drug reference.  Very slow to install, but once there it works great.  As fast and usable as on my old TX.  Faster, actually.

The smart link works great too.  You have to do a manual unlock (like on the Mac/Palm according to a collegue), but that is no big deal.

Even Skyscape now list Palm Pre as an option in their product pages

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Posted in All, Palm Web OS | 4 Comments »

Pediatric Clinical Practice Guidelines & Policies on the PDA

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Certainly, it’s a great idea to have all those evidence based policies and guidelines endorsed by the APP in the palm of hands!

Pediatric Clinical Practice Guidelines

The AAP’s compilation of the latest guidelines and policies is available in the form of Mobipocket document.

The PDA version of the Pediatric Clinical Practice Guidelines and Policies “9th edition” offers more than just the policies and statements, it includes some other very useful features. Turn your audio on and see the following video for more details.

The addition of a bilirubin assessment tool, the vaccines scheduling, patient guidance, and some ICD codes makes this great evidence-based PDA reference a repository of the all tools that a pediatrician may need in practice.

However, as mentioned in the video above, the app need to be available in other medical readers that we are all familiar with such as Skyscape or Unbound Medicine.

For $55 [members] and $60 [non-members] the stand alone PDA version only it can be downloaded from the AAP’s Book store

We can also buy $100 the book+CD Rom+PDA version from Amazon, or $105 [members] -$90 [non-members] directly from AAP’s Bookstore.

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Posted in All, All-in-one Applications, Coding & Billing, Evidence Based Pediatrics, Vaccines | 6 Comments »

Pepid does not fit into the iPhone!

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

When Pepid first launched their new native application on the iPhone and iPod Touch we all cheered. However, unfortunately, the app came pretty much to our disappointment.

Turn your audio on and see the next couple of videos for details;

The very reason that we need a native app is to avoid all the hassles with Internet connection such as the horrible 3G connection of At&T and the often missing WiFi inside our hospital corridors and ERs [where we use Pepid the most].

This Pepid native app does not do three of the most important dynamic functions that we frequently use on the bedside, namely, the drug dose calculator, the calculators, and the drug to drug interactions! They hosted these functions on their server and we can’t access them without active Internet connection.

What’s the point of this app? If we have Internet connection we can then visit Pepid mobile [read this post for details] and have a fully functioning Pepid.

In addition to this great shortage, there are also a number of design problems as seen in the videos above. They just copied and pasted what was there in Palm and Pocket PC into the iPhone which of course has horrible sequences.

There’s only one good thing with this app which is the new toxicology reference Pepid Elements provided for free when the app is downloaded.

Pepid native app simply does not fit into the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Our message to Pepid, we love Pepid, we love the wonderful ER info and the great content but if you don’t fix these design and connection issues expect to refund most of your iPhone subscribers, if not already did!

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Posted in All, All-in-one Applications, Opinions, iPhone | 12 Comments »

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