Technology Report
This new feature will highlight some of the technological tools and applications, more commonly referred to as "apps", which facilitate better care for long-term care residents. Check back often for more! If you know of any that have been especially useful to you and your practice, please feel free to share with us.
Medical Apps to Assist in Your Practice
by Jay Luxenberg, MD, CMD
originally posted April 2011
A few months back, we highlighted some apps that aren’t specifically medical, but are incredibly useful in a medical practice. This month I’d like to talk about a few apps that actually are targeted to us.
I’m sure everyone with a smartphone, PDA (assuming PDAs are still in use at all) or tablet uses at least one and probably several apps to access news. We are all interested in what is happening in the world. As medical folk, though, we have more specific interests that are poorly served in the general news media. For example, those of us in the long-term care world in California are desperate for accurate and timely information on the state budget process and the impact of the recent cuts on various programs serving the elderly. Although the general newspapers and news sites have some of this information, it takes searching and the articles are often general rather than containing the specific information (and dare I say it – gossip) that we crave. That is where the California Healthline app comes in. California Healthline is published by the California Healthcare Foundation. California Healthline itself is a website that is updated frequently and one can follow them on Twitter or Facebook, or your favorite RSS newsreader (more on those in a future article) but I prefer their app. It’s currently available for the iPhone and iPad. It allows you to store recent news content directly on your device for offline reading, for times you are off the internet, so you can even read it on an airplane. The app is free of charge and free of advertisements. I haven’t noticed any particular evident problems with interpretation of news, but of course your mileage may vary. I hope it soon becomes available for other platforms, particularly the fast growing Android platform.
What about medical news? I’m sure we each have our favorites, and I’ll share mine. For me, it’s easy to decide which apps I use the most – they find their way to the first page on my phone and iPad. Medscape seems to always reside there. It has many functions helpful for medical use, but today I am talking about the “news” function. Medscape has a “Medscape Today” function reached by clicking on “news”, which brings you to news from several wire services as well as Medscape’s parent company, WebMD. Medscape is available for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Android. Once you have it – explore the rest of the app as well. You will be amazed at all the useful information it has. There are more than 4000 clinical reference articles, available off-line. There is access to more than 2500 medical images and 150 videos. It essentially serves as a portable textbook. You can be stranded on a ski lift for 10 hours and end up knowing more medicine than your old chief of service. It also serves as an excellent drug reference, much like Epocrates. It has good coverage of herbal treatments and vitamins as well. It has a nice drug interaction checker. I am not sure why, but Epocrates is behind the times in supporting the iPad’s screen resolution, and I find myself using Medscape instead most of the time.
Speaking of Epocrates, one of the initial developers of Epocrates has a new app that I have been having fun with. It is called Doximity, and it’s available for iPhone and Android so far. It is free, and after signing up it almost magically (or perhaps symptomatic of the loss of privacy associated with a career in medicine) it finds all the folks you went to medical school and the folks you trained with in residency. Find out what specialties they chose, and where they are living. See if any have addresses in jails or prisons. You can download their contact information and set the ones you liked as “colleagues”. Add you consultant network as colleagues, and you can send them encrypted e-mail. It also let’s you look up physicians by specialty nearby or by zip code. Put “90210 plastic” in search and you will have a list of the more than 200 plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills. You can even do special searches like finding physicians that speak a certain language in a particular specialty. Telugu speaking cardiologists, anyone? It also has the phone numbers of medical students – handy for when you will be late to attending rounds. The app also finds and gives you phone numbers for your local hospitals, medical facilities and pharmacies. It starts with a map of your vicinity, and with a touch of a button you can identify all the 24-hour pharmacies and touch them to dial. For the other pharmacies it has their hours. Of course, this works for locations other than your local one as well. All-in-all, a very nice start for a relatively new app.
I’ll leave some apps to discuss in future editions of the Wave. Meanwhile, please feel free to suggest your own favorites.
CALTCM is Excited to Announce Our Very Own App!
by Barbara Hulz
originally posted March 2011
CALTCM Members can now access exclusive resources, links, calendar events, registration forms, personal profiles, and the entire CALTCM membership directory via an exclusive app! The app is currently only available for Apple products. The Android app will be released shortly.
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To download our app: The "Articles" icon will lead you to multiple resources and tools. If you would like more information, or would like to see additional content added, please contact us at info@caltcm.org. |
New Apps Lend Helping Hand to LTC Physicians
by Jay Luxenberg, MD, CMD
originally posted February 2011
As I watched group of attending physicians at work while they were admitting patients to our nursing home, I was struck by how often they were consulting their smart phones, iPads or laptops. In particular, smart phones seem to be the most commonly used resource. This year, CALTCM intends to highlight some of the technological tools, particularly “apps”, which facilitate better care for long-term care residents. As an Apple addict, I have to admit that my own familiarity is with Mac applications, iPhone and iPad apps. I’d love to hear of your own experience with other platforms.
Perhaps the best place to start when considering medical apps is a web site devoted to reviewing them. iMedicalApps.com gathers reviews from medical professionals, including medical students, and I have found it a useful tool in identifying those apps that are truly useful while eliminating lots of the junk that is out there. They are platform agnostic, so there are plenty of Android and Windows Phone app reviews as well as iOS (Apple’s operating system for phones). They periodically issue useful lists such as the top 10 free iPhone medical apps.
I also think it is very important to think about apps that are not specifically medical, but make life in long term care medicine much easier. I am a big fan of Evernote. Evernote is a program which runs on Macs, Windows, and Linux. There are versions that run on the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, and others. In fact, they tout that they are available for “nearly every computer, phone and mobile device.” What it is is a way to sync notes, pictures and sound files between your computer and your mobile device, while keeping copies “in the cloud” where you can access them from any computer you happen to be at. What good is this from a medical standpoint? Simply, I keep copies of all the state and federal regulations that we live and die by, I keep all the little tables and algorithms and lists that I find useful for differential diagnosis, etc. I keep information I need about the CCRCs and RCFEs and hospitals that I need to have handy. I keep copies of forms like the POLST, and scales like the GDS, and key papers, all as pdfs. I can then e-mail them to students or colleagues when they come up in conversation. I keep scans of my Passport and itinerary when I travel for meetings. I put in handouts, such as the pdf AMDA now uses instead of paper handouts at the national meeting. I put in the manual for the phone system at work, and “how to” instructions for tasks for our electronic health record system. I put in the manuals for my camera and all the other gadgets I use. I put in the budget categories I need in my role as an administrator. I put in ICD9 codes and E&M codes. I put in driving and bus directions to our facility from the university, so I can save time instructing students how to get there. I know of others that even record Grand Rounds on their cell phone, to play it back at their convenience. It also handles pictures, so I can snap a picture using my phone of a poster at a meeting and have it available when I get back to work.
Did I mention Shared Notebooks? Even with a free Evernote account, you can set up a notebook to share. There is a core group at our nursing home that is working on end-of-life care issues. We set up a shared notebook with shared resources like Joanne Lynn’s Sourcebook, the Handbook for Mortals, the Stanford End-of-Life Care Curriculum, a RAND Heath White Paper, POLST forms in every language available, and lots more. I share it with a limited number of coworkers, but one could also share with the whole world. Paying customers can also allow their shared notebooks to be modified by any of the people sharing it. Think how useful it would be to have policies and procedures available, or protocols for informing the physician about changes of condition, similar to the AMDA “know-it-all”™ cards, but customized per each physicians preference. How cool.
You probably get it now – I use Evernote as a portable brain. I can clip a web page or put a note into my cell phone, and using the magic of “The cloud” it will be available wherever I am. I can organize these files, and share subsets with different teams at work, or different groups of friends and family. Best of all, unless you are a particularly heavy user, it is free! Of course, I am a heavy user, but the annual price for storing huge quantities of data is very modest.
In upcoming editions of the Wave, we plan to highlight many useful apps, and I would love to hear from you if you have a particular favorite. E-mail me at: jay@luxenberg.net