More Free Stuff
In a previous installment, I hopefully whetted your appetite with one of my favorite newest free software finds for the Palm PDA, the Splinting Manual for PDA (free download at www.meistermed.com). This time Id like to carry on that theme by revealing more great free medical software for your PDA.
First of all, before we get too far away from MeisterMed, I have to say that they have outdone themselves. Since my last article, they have released DermMeister, a superlative FREE piece of software for your PDA. DermMeister is a photo atlas of 66 common derm disorders and two skin surgery procedures. It contains hundreds of color photos and has the familiar ease of use of iSilo hyperlinking and bookmarks. DermMeister is well-organized and easy to search. You can look up conditions by name Alphabetically, by type of disorder Categorically (like hair disorders, cancers, etc.), or by body areas Regionally. Besides lots of great pictures, DermMeister puts loads of diagnostic and treatment info at your fingertips. Its a great bedside tool for patient education. Read the acknowledgements within DermMeister, but Ive got to give kudos right now to Richard Usatine, M.D., and Andrew Schechtman, M.D. for a great piece of work. Theyve made DermMeister free to the medical community to improve the quality of the care provided to their patients with skin conditions. Well done!
Mobile Merck Medicus has to be my favorite free medical PDA site. The folks at Merck have really done an outstanding job of bringing the best of medical informatics to the medical community, making it portable in the PDA format, and doing it for free. This site is not to be missed! Available with both Palm OS and Pocket PC versions, the site includes free downloads of the complete Merck Manual, 17th Edition, and the Pocket Guide to Diagnostic Tests. These are both indispensable additions to your PDA medical tool bag. As if that werent enough, Mobile Merck Medicus includes features which update as often as you HotSync. You can automatically download the latest Reuters Medical News and MEDLINE Journal Abstracts. You can even enter MEDLINE searches on your PDA and Mobile Merck Medicus will automatically do the search the next time you HotSync and install the results to your PDA. These are very convenient features for the clinician on the go. The software is full-featured and powered by Unbound Medicine. These are truly must-have programs for your PDA. Go to http://www.merckmedicus.com/pp/us/hcp/hcp_mobile_medicus.jsp and do it now.
Heres a small freebie that I recommend to my PA students. Theyre all embroiled in such courses as Research Methodology, Clinical Epidemiology, and the like. So, it seems a natural that a little item called EBM Calculator would be a handy tool for them. Maybe youll find it useful the next time you review the literature or attend a conference.
EBM Calculator helps you to automatically calculate the statistics used in diagnostic studies, prospective studies, case control studies, and randomized control trials. It is available as a Palm or Pocket PC download. What I especially like is that its from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Toronto. It also has a small memory footprint of only 48K. You can see it at work in the following animation and download it at the following link: http://www.cebm.utoronto.ca/palm/ebmcalc
Geriatrics At Your Fingertips comes to us free, courtesy of the American Geriatrics Society. Go to http://www.geriatricsatyourfingertips.org/front-back/pda.asp to register for free and download the Palm or Pocket PC version. I was quite excited to hear about the latest 2005 version of GAYF becoming available. I have been a big fan of the 2004 edition. It was hard to imagine improvements, but the AGS and software developer USBMIS have done their jobs. GAYF is a piece of work. The interface is graphically clean and esthetically pleasing. You can search the index alphabetically or search the comprehensive table of contents. There is also a useful Tools tab that includes Abbreviations, Assessment Instruments, and Calculating Equations. Geriatrics At Your Fingertips has a great deal to recommend it besides the fact that its free. It contains a wealth of information that is useful beyond the geriatric patient. It deserves a good trial in order to get used to all of the information it contains.
C-Tools 2.0 is available from the American Cancer Society at http://www.cancer.org/docroot/COM/content/div_TX/COM_5_1x_The_C-Tools_20.asp?sitearea=COM Youve got to love the ACS for bringing us a timesaving PDA tool that will provide you with instant access to the most recent cancer information, and for doing it free. C-Tools is composed of 12 different tools and you can install one or all of them. They range from calculators (like Adult BMI calculator and Drug calculator) to discussions of Emerging Technology to Warning Signs of Childhood Cancers. For me, perhaps the best tools are some of the patient education pieces. These include Questions Patients Ask, Tobacco Control, and a great Skin Cancer tool, complete with color pictures. Kudos to the American Cancer Society. We need more tools like C-Tools.
Here is a boost for those of you with wireless Internet access on your PDAs. MD on Tap from the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health allows you to do actual MEDLINE searches on the fly, wirelessly, and for free. MEDLINE Database on Tap is pretty amazing. It allows you to set the parameters of the search, keep a history of previous queries, save selected citations to Memo Pad, link-out to full-text web sites, and more. Here is the link to the web site and a couple of screen shots showing MD on Tap in action. Id say that this is our tax dollars at work for medical professionals. http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/mdot/mdot.php
Shots 2005 is another one of those must-have pieces of software for your medical PDA. It is produced by the Group on Immunization Education of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine and can be accessed at http://www.immunizationed.org/default.aspx .Available for Palm OS and Pocket PC, Shots 2005 is up-to-date with the latest immunization information for adults, children and missed doses. It is graphically presented and includes additional in-depth information about specific vaccines.
Free medical PDA software is increasingly available, making a PDA an increasingly important tool in your medical kit. These have been some of my favorite and some of the latest. Maybe you know of additional free PDA programs, applets or documents that youd like to share with your colleagues. Pass them along to me, and Ill be happy to share.
Chris Helopoulos is a Chief Editor of pdaMD. He is Operations Director of the Barry University Physician Assistant Program Expansion at St. Petersburg College. He has been an avid medical PDA aficionado since 1999 when he began to promote PDA use by his PA students. He has been a frequent contributor and speaker, has helped to develop and market patient tracking PDA software, and is the author of The Medical Professionals Guide to Handheld Computing, published in 2004 by Jones and Bartlett Publishers.