Gone are the days of a doctor carrying heavy, voluminous books in the pockets of our lab coats. Smart phones have made life much easier and lighter.
As a professional locum tenens doctor, I am constantly traveling from hospital to hospital, job to job. Carrying my tomes of information is much easier through use of smart phone applications. Each doc has their own favorites and some are quite specific to their individual practice of medicine, specialty and practice setting. Here are a few of my most used medical apps:
Here are a few of my most used medical apps:
Epocrates
This is my “go-to” for a pharmacopeia and drug dosing. I pay for the upgrades to include disease information, diagnostics, treatment plans and lab values. If I could only have one app for work, it would be this one.
MedCalX
While there are other apps that include a medical calculator, this is my favorite. From looking up CHADVASC scores to Well’s criteria to corrected calcium, this app has it all, for all specialties.
Up to Date
This is the trusted medical reference that I see most used in hospital settings. All that great information is packed into a nice app for your smart phone with good searchability. You must have a subscription for this service.
PalmEM
This is another app I find myself using on a weekly basis. This is a well-organized and comprehensive app for quick look up of everything from fracture and skin lesion descriptions to toxicology and pediatric vitals, tube sizes and med doses.
Amazon Kindle App
All the text books I use a main references are available as an e-book and readable on my Kindle app. This simplifies my life greatly and makes travel with all my reference material so much easier. I can now have access to all my study material, wherever I am in the world.
Therapeutic Guidelines (Australia)
I also work overseas and use this app as my Australian resource. This is a paid subscription service that is a basic pharmacopeia and has detailed disease information including treatment guidelines.
Keeping up with medical news can be a daunting task. For my practice of global health, family and emergency medicine I use the following news apps:
Global Humanitarian Reports and Updates
Global Humanitarian Reports and Updates
All the news from CDC including their MMWR and EID magazines
Great medical news app customizable by specialties
Great general medical news app