As a medical professional, it is your duty to stay constantly updated on modern treatment techniques and understanding of illnesses if you are expected to deliver the best standard of care possible.
This is precisely why doctors spend such a long time in school. The human body is a complex, intricate machine that can fail in a multitude of ways that each require their own special treatment options. However, humans aren’t infallible, over time it can be expected that some knowledge will be lost to time, but thanks to modern technology this forgetfulness doesn’t have to translate into a lower level of care. Utilizing your smartphone, you can quickly brush up your knowledge on a certain condition or medication to better cater your treatment to an individual’s specific issue. With the right apps, there will be no need to consult your old school textbooks or to phone a friend, the information will be right there waiting for you.
Here are just some of these apps that have gained a massive following among medical professionals:
GetWeave
Chances are you don’t only deal with one or a handful of patients in a day, remembering all of their appointments. Their recurring issues also require careful tracking, plus the last thing you’d want is to accidentally talk to one patient as if they were a different one, that’s not a good look. With the app GetWeave, you have the ability to carefully curate a full schedule of appointments and their specifics in a helpful and easy to use interface that you can set to remind you the day of the appointment or even several days beforehand. If you think you might have to hit the books before following up with a certain patient, this app is invaluable.
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PEPID
This app functions to help medical staff make crucial decisions during the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment stages of injury or illness. Some jurisdictions even allow for the use of PEPID while treating patients to count towards continuing education credits. What this app does is offer full profiles of medical conditions complete with their symptoms and treatment. Not only that, there is a section called the Symptom Checker that allows you to input symptoms one by one and see which conditions your patient might be suffering from. This is extremely helpful since you might pick up a rare condition that other professionals without the app might neglect to screen for.
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Epocrates
A much needed application, Epocrates helps connect doctors to the kind of drug lists that pharmacists have access to. A complete list of drug interactions, side effects, and primary treatment outcomes are all available to any doctor with the application. If your patient asks for a certain kind of medication you aren’t familiar with, you can quickly look it to see if it might be helpful to them. It also informs you what kind of specialists you can refer them to if you aren’t personally comfortable with prescribing that medication. A few other helpful tools are bundled in as well, such as BMI calculations and other miscellaneous features.
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Figure 1
Often times the same disease can present itself in different ways, or you might even come across something you’ve never seen before. With Figure 1, you can share & compare medical issues with other physicians and get feedback from real professionals as to what they think the picture may be indicative of. You can also search through confirmed pictures of known conditions to compare against the information you have in front of you. This greatly reduces the chances of misdiagnosis, reducing overall patient suffering exponentially. For people new to a certain department, it can bring you up to speed on signs to look for in a patient without you having to make the mistake of missing them the first few times.
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Case
For those who like to stay on top of new studies and information, Case is the perfect app for the job. 81 different specialties are supported, with many different journals being represented in each of these specialties. Not only that, you can tag certain keywords yourself, and be updating any time new studies are published around said keywords. For doctors who are on the cusp of new medicine or want to see how their current treatment plans can be improved based on data from real studies, Case can be a godsend. On top of it all, there is a machine learning aspect to Case, in that it suggests to your new journals to read based on what you’ve read in the past. Journals you may never have found on your own may appear in your feed and drastically change how you conceptualize a certain condition or medication.
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Cerner Physician Express II
For an app that functions much like a personal ledger of patient information, Cerner Physician Express II fits the bill nicely. It allows you to carefully organize all patient information into an easy to access archive complete with their current health issues, allergies, medications, and just about any other vital statistics important to caring for that patient. Instead of having to call to your secretary or sift through thousands of paper records, you can easily search by name or condition to brush up on what’s been happening in that patient’s life as far as medical care is concerned.
Doctors are one job that definitely won’t be feeling the pain of automation as time moves on. People are complex and it requires a carefully trained human eye to properly diagnose and treat patients. That doesn’t mean that technology can’t make the lives of both professionals and patients much easier though, a smartphone weighing fractions of a pound can contain more information than the most weighty medical texts out there, plus all of this information can be updated on the fly. If you want to make sure that you’re doing the absolute best job you can as a medical professional, consider downloading one or all of these apps to help round out your care giving. What used to be simple human failings can now be easily worked around with very simple and easy to use applications. Make sure that the applications you download are widely used and highly recommended as patient health and wellness should always be our top priority.
