The Palmdoc Chronicles

by Steve Wheelwright

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
-Lao Tzu

For many people, the most difficult part of a big project is simply starting. The question of, “Where do I start?” is almost overwhelming. That’s where “Cram Fighter” comes in.

The basic, ingenious idea of “Cram Fighter” is that it takes all the guess work out of deciding what and when you should study. You don’t have to spend hours looking at all your materials and trying to decide what you’ll study each day. You can spend a few minutes setting up the app and then it arranges it all for you.

The user interface is very simple. Begin by selecting a start date and your exam date. Choose what days of the week and how many hours your can devote to studying each day. It can vary from day to day. You can even put in “off days” to take a much-needed break.

You can then select your study material. Here is where “Cram Fighter” shines. It has a database of the most popular board study materials. It was just updated to include the 2010 edition of First Aid. Here are some examples just to give you an idea:

Inside each study resource, you can select the whole book or select each chapter you would like to study. For example, you can just select the few chapters you need in-depth study on in Rapid Review Path and focus on First Aid for the rest of your Path study. You are in control.

Read the rest of this entry »

After a brief foray following which it was withdrawn, Lexi-Comp On Hand makes it’s appearance in the Palm App Catalog. This is another major medical software application hot on the heels of Pepid which made it’s WebOS debut not long ago.
The download is free and comes with 30-days of access to Lexi-Drugs & Lexi-Interact. After 30 days, one can obtain an access code directly from Lexi-Comp for continued access by visiting www.lexi.com.
A one-year subscription to Lexi-Drugs and Lexi-Interact costs $115.00.

PreCentral.net has nice a round up on the current medical applications for the WebOS platform which you can download right now from the App Catalog. There are a couple more in Homebrew, done by yours truly with a little help from friends, which might interest you: OncoPDA (I keep telling myself I need to update this and get it submitted to the App Catalog but there’s only 24 hours in a day!!) and DrugView.
The missing piece which should be coming soon (”early this year“) of course is Epocrates. C’mon fellas, release that app already!

Meistermed has come out with a new app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Called Procedures: Hospital Collection it comprises the following:

15 inpatient procedures, 80+ minutes high res video, 150+ photos. X-rays. Step-by-step instructions. Everything you need to know about thoracentesis, paracentesis, bone marrow biopsy, central lines of every flavor, lumbar puncture, intubation, and more. Created with Dr. Joe Esherick, expert proceduralist, director of Ventura’s medical ICU and teacher of hospitalist procedures with the National Procedures Institute.

Visit www.meistermed.com/procedures/ for more details and screenshots.
Free Promo Codes (US only) available for those interested and able to write up a review for for this blog.

Mary Kay Rossi wrote in to inform us about this new app:

Making its official launch at HIMSS 2010, VisualDx Mobile for the iPhone and iPod Touch aids physicians in their decision making efforts by increasing diagnostic accuracy, helping to reduce health care costs associated with unnecessary return visits, referrals, and tests– all of which increase patient satisfaction.
VisualDx Mobile allows clinicians to visually validate a patient’s diagnosis, either by building differential diagnosis based on patient symptoms or searching for a specific diagnosis by name. With thousands of medical images, VisualDx Mobile is the only medical app to show disease variation by age, stage, and skin type.
Go to http://www.visualdx.com/mobile to learn more, or visit VisualDx Mobile on the iTunes App Store to download.
We are excited to hear feedback from our users about VisualDx Mobile, so please let me know if you have any questions or comments regarding our medical app.

So if you are an iPhone/iPod Touch user, go hop over to http://www.visualdx.com/mobile. Looks nice and I hope they will come out with a WebOS version in the future.

Everyday I scour news of all sorts including regular feeds from medical information sites and journals. The most efficient way to filter this torrent of information is to use RSS or news feeds and I currently rely on Google’s Reader service (the mobile version runs very well on the Palm Pre). However you might for a change appreciate a small dose of medical information rather than being presented with massive chunks of information everyday. Imagine if a useful tip or clinical pearl were to be delivered to your handheld once a day. That would be easily digestible! Enter the Daily Dose of Medical Knowledge application for WebOS to fill this niche.

According to the blurb:

Daily Dose offers high level medical info, with references, daily. Topics range the gamut of medical knowledge, from lab tests and their uses to patient management and diagnosis. Physicians, residents, physician assistants, students, nurses, and other medical professionals can benefit from Daily Dose. Doses can be accessed for up to a week. You can also save your favorite doses to be accessed any time. *An Internet connection is required to update doses.

The WebOS version works very well over 3G. The presentation is simple and neat. If you click on the featured dose of the day, you will be presented with a pageful of information on the topic and links to references.

The software allows you to view the last 7 days worth of doses

as well as allow you to save your favorite doses (there doesn’t appear to be any limit to the number you can save). I can imagine if the list gets long, there should be a search facility to filter the item you are looking for - something Brimsoft should implement in future versions.
The content seems to be mainly Internal medicine material which would be suited to medical students, residents, primary care doctors and physicians. If anything can be done to improve the software further is perhaps the inclusion of illustrations or images to spice up the daily dose. I see also potential for Daily Doses of speciality information - oncology, O&G, paediatrics etc.
All in all a good effort and well worth the $3.99 in the App Catalog
I’d like to thank Brian of Brimsoft for the opportunity to test drive the WebOS version of Daily Dose.

Chris Thorman of Medical Software Advice wrote in:

You’ve probably heard the news that Apple is set to release a new tablet PC on Wednesday. That got us thinking here at Medical Software Advice about whether or not this new device will be the first tablet PC to break through in the healthcare industry.

I’ve created a short survey (8 multiple choice questions) about what tablet PC features are important to healthcare professionals. I’ll use the results from the survey to determine which tablet PC is best positioned to rule the halls of healthcare. Even if you’ve never used a tablet PC, I’d love to get your opinion on what features are important.

Here is the link to the survey

While anxiously waiting for what Steve Jobs has to say about the most anticipated Apple iSlate, do take a minute to answer the questions in the survey.

Keeping medical references on your PDA phone is very convenient. We often prefer local storage to online access as it is faster and does not rely on a wireless connection which may be slow at times.
The types of documents vary, and commonly these include;
1) PDF files. These are easy enough to copy to the USB partition on your Palm Pre (the /media/internal). I suggest you organise the folders and keep the PDFs separately. If you launch the PDF viewer, it should locate the available PDF files for you to view. The default PDF viewer does not support landscape mode, but there is a landscape patch available for the PDF viewer (you need either WebOS Quick Install or Preware to install the patch). Landscape mode is much better to read journal publications and most medical PDF documents.
2) Plain text files. For short documents, you could keep these organised within ClassicNotes for easy lookup and reference. For longer documents, consider a dedicated ebook reader like pReader which is freeware and supports conversion from html, PalmDoc pdb, mobipocket formats. It allows you to set bookmarks, search (from version 0.7.5 onwards) and image support but unfortunately does not support hyperlinks at this point in time.
2) Hyperlinked (HTML) documents.. These are useful for larger references since hyperlinks allow you to jump easily from section to section. Images are also supported as are tables and so on. iSilo is the preferred reader for such medical documents and there is a ready converter for HTML to iSilo.
Unfortunately a WebOS version of iSilo is not available yet. You could run iSilo for PalmOS in Classic but you don’t get the full screen and all the WebOS goodness. There is however a solution to view local Hyperlink documents on your Palm Pre provided you have the source HTML document.
1) You need to install Lighttpd, a web server, on your Palm Pre. This is available from the Optware section of Preware (if you haven’t installed Preware before go here).
After you have successfully installed Lighttpd, you can read your USB Internal drive from the Pre’s browser. To do so, just navigate to
http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1
2) Plug in your Pre to the PC, select USB mode, and drag and drop your HTML documents to the USB drive. Again, you should probably organise your documents in subfolders to keep things neat.
Open your browser and you will see the directory structure of your files from http://localhost. All you have to do then is navigate to the index html file of your ebook and load it in your browser.
3) Read away!

Here’s a sample screenshot of a text reference in landscape mode on the Pre’s browser:

You might want to tweak some settings:
Read the rest of this entry »

First of all it’s called the iPod Touch, not the iTouch (a common mistake). One of the common misconceptions is the need to get an iPhone if one wanted a PDA as an organiser and to run the medical applications available for the iPhone platform.
The answer is no, you do not need to get an iPhone. Cash strapped medical students and junior doctors who already have a functional phone need not fork out more $$$ just to run useful medical applications. An iPod Touch will do nicely, thank you. It will run almost all the available medical applications. The caveat is that the iPod Touch requires that you have Wifi if the application needs an Internet connection. This is not so much a problem nowadays as Wifi is pretty ubiquitous at work and at home.
So the tip of the day is if you want a PDA and not a PDA phone then do consider getting an iPod Touch. It’ll give you more bang for your buck and you don’t need to ditch your trusty Nokia phone.

(see MedPage Today via KevinMD.com)

Note on Palm PDAs:
It’s a pity the TX is the last PalmOS PDA from Palm. I hope they will consider a dedicated WebOS PDA or Tablet in the future as I believe there is a nice market for those who want only a PDA and not a PDA phone. If you are a die-hard Garnet fan, you might be interested to know that Aceeca, a New Zealand company, is Readying New Palm OS Garnet Handhelds

MedicMate is a Windows Mobile Touchscreen application for busy hospital doctors which helps you track patients, keep job lists, perform hand overs wirelessly and also maintain e-guides.
Tim from MedicMate writes in that for a limited time only, a full license is available for £29.95
The application runs on Windows Mobile operating system 2003, 5 or 6; Touchscreen; 64MB RAM
For more information see the MedicMate website

Pepid has announced a Beta for WebOS

In 2009, we released two new platforms—the first was in March, when we released our application for the iPhone. We also announced a beta release this month for the Palm Pre smart phone. PEPID is the first to create a medical software application specifically designed for this device.
Along with keeping up with new platforms and mobile technologies, PEPID continues to keep its content current and relevant, and has built new medical tools. We’ve had a great response to the new Differential Diagnosis Generator (DDX), which allows you to generate a weighted list of possible diagnoses by entering your patient’s gender, age, symptoms, and severity of symptoms.
We’ve also introduced PEPID’s Platinum Suites, which bundle our comprehensive content and reference guides with the latest tools to help you provide the best care for your patients. Platinum Suites are the perfect way to have all of the information and resources you need, provided at a discounted price than if you bought each product and tool separately.

More details:

PEPID offers clinicians specialty products that focus on the way they practice medicine and incorporates medical information and tools such as a differential diagnosis generator, medical calculators, dosing calculators, drug interactions generator, a drug database that includes 7,500 drugs, and more than 800 illustrations. Regular updates keep content current with the latest medical and clinical information, and alliances with more than a dozen leading healthcare associations, such as the American Academy of Emergency Medicine™ and the Family Physicians Inquires Network™, ensure that PEPID delivers the best clinical content available. There are practice-focused PEPID Platinum Suites available for: — Physicians: emergency physicians, primary care and clinical rotations — Professional Nurses: clinical nursing, critical care, oncology, and gerontological nursing — Physicians-in-Training — Student Nurses — Emergency Medical Teams — Pharmacologists There are PEPID Platinum Suites for every member of the Palm Pre medical community.

You can download the application from the Webinstall Link here but one needs to be in an “Official country release” according to Palm.
Pepid will also show up in the Preware default feeds (which includes the Palm App RSS feeds). I cannot confirm if it is in the App Catalog as my current App Catalog shows zero apps (as I am not in the official country distribution list, sadly)