10 Must-See iPhone Apps for Doctors and Patients

by Nicholas Kolakowski

This app, directly aimed at the medical community, offers up the complete 2009 medical database for ICD-9, CPT and HCPS codes, along with Global periods for CPT from the AMA “for all medical specialties.” Search can be done using single words, multiple words or fragments.

This app allows users to monitor and keep track of their blood glucose levels, saving information by time and date. Other features include the ability to e-mail information to a physician, add text notes to entries and display historical data.

After detecting the user’s location automatically, this app displays search results for the nearest hospitals. The app is also capable of showing an interactive map with driving directions, and one tap will call the hospital’s number. In order to run the app, obviously, the iPhone must be connected to the Internet.

A free medical calculator with a wide selection of formulas and scores, support for U.S. and S.I. units, bibliographic references for formulas, searchable equations by name or keywords. Meant for physicians and health care professionals who, say, need the formula for the Rule of Six, or Absolute Neutrophil Count.

Inputting your symptoms into this app will result in output of relevant diseases, treatments and directions to the nearest care facility. The app will map, call and locate up to 60,000 medical facilities, including hundreds of retail clinics and emergency rooms. Plus, you can narrow down “possible causes” for that cough.

An app for searching through PubMed, an online compendium of medical articles, that lets users search for articles, e-mail the results as formatted text or RIS tagged record, recall recent searches, and navigate between references with a formatted view. Also comes in a free “Lite” version that limits the user to five records returned per search.

This app allows users to keep track of their pills, shots, liquid, tablets and virtually anything else ingested in the name of health, with a pop-up reminder to take a dose whenever needed. Users can e-mail a log of their medicines and view a history of their prescriptions.

Physicians and health care professionals can use this app, which bills itself as a “complete mobile Electronic Medical Record system,” to track and manage their patients. Features include the ability to track labs and studies, look up and capture CPT4 and ICD9 codes, write SOAP and Procedure notes, and sync data to an online data center.

This app claims to estimate users’ “cognitive effectiveness” relative to when they’re fully rested, by asking them a short series of questions and then running the data through an algorithm. The app then shows users how their lack of sleep translates into an equivalent blood-alcohol level (also known as Blood Alcohol Concentration, or BAC); if the “BAC Equivalence” climbs high enough, that might suggest the user should stop their all-nighter and get some shut-eye.

Although much of the hype surrounding swine flu seems to have died down in recent weeks, the virus is still very much working its way through the global population. This app aims to connect users with reliable sources of information about the spread of the disease, allowing access to “Authoritative News Source,” “Authoritative Twitter Feeds” and “Resources on the Web.”