Net News Archive

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

iStetho Adapter and iStethoscope Pro Make a Great Combo for iPhone

Dr. Blaine Warkentine MD, a partner at a startup firm RidRx, is telling us that the firm is now selling directly to consumers its patent pending iStetho Adapter that can convert an iPhone/iPod touch and an old stethoscope into an electronic one. Also, the adapter is designed to work in tandem with the powerful iStethoscope Pro software that does many tricks with auscultation sounds, such as displaying sound spectrograms, replaying and emailing recordings, etc.

More about the adapter:

Convert with a scissors your old stethoscope into a digital one that you can use to store audio files of patients and email if needed. Our application amplifies the signal and eliminates audio outside of what is important for diagnosis. Our adapter simply offers a quick release sound proof channel for analog audio to be converted by your mobile devices microphone. Simple and sweet.

Video demonstration of iStethoscope Pro software:

(A disclaimer from Medgadget: US FDA and other regulatory agencies are far behind the times that we live in, so they have no current policies to deal with the proliferation of mobile computing devices and their potential uses in medicine. Hence, none of the iPhone applications and attachments are classified as medical devices, so they are sold for non medical uses only.)

Product page: iStetho Adapter... ($29.99)

More about iStethoscope Pro...

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Friday, November 13, 2009

Medpedia Expands System to Include Q&As, Alerts, Analysis of Medical News

Medpedia, an information source styled on Wikipedia but with authoritative authorship, has released new tools to help people sift through medical information and even get some questions answered by experts.

Medpedia Answers collects questions and answers about health, medicine and the body. Each question is tagged with both MeSH and plain-English headings for better discovery. Each question is also pushed into relevant areas throughout the Medpedia Project such as patient communities and article pages. Questions and answers are for general information purposes only, not as a substitute for in-person evaluation or specific professional advice. Anyone with a profile on Medpedia can participate. The Medpedia Answers Top Contributors list gives recognition to the most active contributors.
Medpedia Alerts is a platform for aggregating and distributing health and medical news alerts. Organizations with real time alerts simply plug their feed into the platform -- joining other feeds such as the CDC, the Red Cross and the American Heart Association -- to attract more readers who can subscribe to custom aggregated alerts feeds for free. In addition, any member of the Medpedia community can submit an alert in the Medpedia Alert Stream, or submit a website or Twitter account to be integrated into the platform on an ongoing basis. Submissions to the Alerts platform are reviewed by the community and if approved, are included in the appropriate Alert categories.

Medpedia News & Analysis allows high-quality health and medical content sources to self organize by category and keywords on Medpedia, and then inter-link with Article pages and other parts of Medpedia. Sources reflect a wide range of professional, academic and scientific topics, and over 150 sources have added themselves and been accepted by the Medpedia community onto the News & Analysis platform. Content in the Medpedia News & Analysis section is not part of the (CC-BY-SA) license of Medpedia and copyright is held soley by the author(s). Organizations and individuals who regularly publish medical and health content online are encouraged to submit their source to the News & Analysis section of Medpedia at http://www.medpedia.com/news_analysis.

Full story: MEDPEDIA PROJECT EXPANDS PLATFORM TO INCLUDE Q&A, NEWS & ANALYSIS AND ALERTS ...

Link: The Medpedia Project...

Flashbacks: Medpedia Going Public ; Medpedia: Online Encyclopedia of Medicine

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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Google Flu Shot Finder Goes Live

Google has released a new tool to help Americans find local pharmacies and clinics offering seasonal and H1N1 flu shots. So far the database is far from complete and Google hopes providers will share information about availability once they get word of the service.

From the Official Google Blog:

At the moment we have data for locations of flu vaccine directly from 20 states and counting. We are also continuing to add information from chain pharmacies and other providers in all 50 states; today, you'll find results from chains such as Walgreens, CVS and PDX participants, such as Kmart, Duane Reade, WinnDixie and Giant Eagle.

Link: Flu Shot Finder...

Friday, November 6, 2009

iChemoTracker Keeps Tabs on Your Chemo Regimen

Merck has released the iChemoDiary for the iPhone platform, an app designed to help patients monitor their time on chemotherapy. The software allows patient to compile chemo treatments, side effects, and general well being, through a set of criteria, that can be later presented to a healthcare provider.

Track your chemotherapy schedule, medication, and treatment plan

Record some of the possible side effects from chemotherapy treatments, such as nausea, vomiting, pain, fatigue, change in temperature, lack of appetite, tingling in feet or toes, diarrhea, constipation, and rash

Create reports that include chemotherapy, medications, and some of the possible side effects on a daily or weekly basis

Share your results and discuss your symptoms with your doctor or nurse so you can have a more accurate and informed discussion

Product page: iChemoDiary ...

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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Simple iPhone App Measures Spine Angles on X-rays

Dr. Frederic P Jacquot, an orthopedic surgeon from France, developed an innovative iPhone application that could measure spine curvature angles "on the fly." Just like other spine clinicians, Dr. Jacquot was trained to measure the Cobb angle, kyphosis angle, and the sacral slope on spine radiographs. So instead of using a protractor, he realized that he could utilize the accelerometer inside the iPhone to do it.

All that one has to do in using the device is align the side of the iPhone to the standard tracings we use routinely, and the position sensor built in the iPhone will do the rest.
The precision of the device itself is 1/10th of a degree, far more precise than the precision of the measure as determined in everyday practice and the literature.

Measures are logged for further use and may be sent by e-mail to the surgeon or staff for recording purposes, with the levels of the measured curve, type of curve and patient id or number. A calibration procedure was also implemented to accurately measure the angle with the horizontal plane as in the sacral slope.

Product page: CobbMeter ...

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Thursday, October 29, 2009

What to Expect When You're Expecting Now Easily Referenced on iPhone

Heidi Murkoff's book What to Expect When You're Expecting is a popular reference for pregnant women (and their overwhelmed partners) who need the advice about all the little and big things that happen during those critical nine months. WhatToExpect.com, the accompanying site to the book, has just launched the free What to Expect Pregnancy Tracker app for the iPhone. Thanks to the mobile platform, the app gives moms and dads the ability to quickly find relevant and actionable info wherever they are, without having to dig through hundreds of pages for that bit of morsel that's most important right now.

What to Expect’s Pregnancy Tracker iPhone app is loaded with invaluable (and fun) interactive features that let parents-to-be follow their pregnancies week by incredible week. Moms (and dads) can calculate and count down to that momentous due date, and keep up with their baby’s astonishing rate of growth (as it works its way through the produce aisle -- from raspberry-size at week eight, to plum-size at week 12, to watermelon at term). They also get Heidi’s weekly updates on what baby’s up to development wise (week 18, twisting and rolling, week 26, opening his eyes), weekly illustrations of their growing fetus, and the opportunity to upload photos of their burgeoning bellies and turn the photos into slide shows to share with their families and friends.
WhatToExpect.com has also launched the Baby Name Finder app for the iPhone. The application includes over 15,000 baby names which can be searched by gender, alphabetically and by origin. It also contains the top baby names for each year from 1950 – 2008 and the origin and meaning of the names included.

Product page: What to Expect iPhone Apps ...

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Wednesday, October 28, 2009

ZocDoc is Going to Washington

Patient appointment management can be a time consuming and often aggravating part of running a medical practice. The mirror of that is the headache patients have to suffer through when trying to book an appointment with a specialist physician. ZocDoc, out of New York City, offers a service that bridges that gap and solves some of the recurrent problems associated with setting up and patient follow through of appointments. We spoke with Oliver Kharraz, MD, COO and co-founder of ZocDoc, about where the service is going and how it's helping patients and practices to save time and money.

ZocDoc has been operating exclusively in New York City, building a base of users that can provide effective distribution of patients across a large number of physician practices. Unlike most online applications that try to cast as wide a net as possible, ZocDoc sees real value in their service once a substantial enough base of doctors and patients sign up in a specific geographic region. This value comes from the ability to quickly and automatically fill canceled appointments, the ease of finding a matching physician given a patient's specific medical history, and a substantial selection of doctors to choose from so that patients don't feel steered to a small subset of what's available in the area. Additionally, because ZocDoc can be integrated into existing practice management software, the switchover can be made almost completely transparent to the practice itself.

Having "conquered" New York, ZocDoc is now expanding to the Washington, DC area to establish another concentration of users for its online service. The application is rather simple but can have substantial benefits, essentially avoiding having to use in-house staff to keep a running up-to-date calendar of appointments. Because ZocDoc focuses on developing a large regional pool of users, canceled appointments can be quickly filled in by other patients that require a visit. Moreover, patients can quickly see available open slots without interrogating the receptionist, essentially providing the convenience that online airline booking did for travel.

Link: ZocDoc homepage...

Flashback: ZocDoc: Doctor Appointments Online

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Monday, October 12, 2009

The Merck Manual Home Health Handbook for iPhone/iPod touch

One of the world's most authoritative medical texts for consumers, The Merck Manual Home Health Handbook, has now been released for the iPhone. The software has been developed by Merck in collaboration with Agile Partners, a software development company.

From the product page:

New York Times Bestseller
This application is based on the New York Times bestseller that has sold over 4 million copies worldwide. The Home Edition features contributions from more than 300 independent physicians, all experts in their fields.

“Must-Have” Medical Reference

Put the trusted medical reference always at your fingertips ... while on the soccer field, a family vacation, a business trip abroad or getting ready to see a physician. The app has an easy-to-use interface for finding the right information quickly.

Trusted, Comprehensive and Understandable

Written in everyday language, the Home Edition is based on the professional version of The Merck Manual which has been trusted by doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals for over a century.

Designed for the iPhone & iPod touch

Designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod touch, the application is essential for everyone who needs to communicate effectively with a healthcare professional, understand a medical condition or learn more about medical terms, procedures and tests. An ‘Emergencies and Injuries’ section is accessible directly from the home screen.

For On-the-Go Consumers of Health Information

Key features of the application enable users to access the trusted content of the Home Edition anywhere (no Internet connection needed), use the full index, email a link to any topic, resize the text for easy reading, perform full text searches and bookmark favorite topics.

Product page: The Merck Manual - Home Edition...

Merck press release: 300 Doctors at your Fingertips: New Merck Manuals Deliver Convenient and Trusted Medical Information to Consumers...

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Friday, October 9, 2009

Smart Phone App ScanAvert Helps Avoid Food Allergies, Drug Interference

To look through ingredient lists and warning labels on every product at a grocery store can be a daunting task for people who have serious food allergies. The same scenario often applies to patients who are taking medications. ScanAvert is a newly launched service that allows patients to use a mobile phone to scan UPC bar codes, and to correlate the known list of ingredients in a product against the patient's own medical facts.

Consumers register for the service at our website, creating a profile from the allergy, prescription, dietary requirement/restriction, and illness categories. They may also establish limits on any of the nutritional values, e.g., carbohydrates, calories. In store aisles, customers scan product barcodes, with their auto focus camera phones, to receive instant feedback as to product compatibility/incompatibility and suggested compatible substitutes.
Our technology will enable shoppers to determine that the products they are purchasing for themselves and their families are compatible with their allergic, prescription, or dietary profiles, e.g., void of peanuts, or, do not contain gluten, an ingredient considered harmful to an individual with Celiac Disease.

The value proposition of ScanAvert is its simplicity and ease of use for the numerous and varied demographic populations that will reap its benefits. For the supermarket, restaurant chain, or food service vendor, it is a unique way to distinguish itself from competition and to provide a new and valuable service for a significant portion of their customer base.

Link: ScanAvert...

(hat tip: mobihealthnews)

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Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Microsoft Unveils H1N1 Swine Flu Response Center

Today Microsoft in partnership with Emory University unveiled the H1N1 Flu Response Center to help people experiencing symptoms of sickness to triage themselves, thereby keeping ERs unclogged for those who might really need clinical help. We participated today in a conference call with David Cerino, General Manager, Microsoft Health Solutions Group and Dr. Arthur Kellermann, Professor of Emergency Medicine and Associate Dean at Emory School of Medicine about this free public health service.

The simple website poses a series of questions based on three levels of assessment developed by Emory with guidance from CDC recommendations. Using basic English, that just about anyone can understand and what a primary care physician would be asking, a series of questions is presented. First, the system identifies whether you meet the CDC criteria of flu. And if so, it proceeds to look for symptoms of potentially severe illness, immediately suggesting you to see a doc. If the illness is not severe enough, the questions then try to identify associated risk factors of becoming sick with the flu, finally leading to a recommendation of whether to seek professional help. Currently operational for people 12 years of age and older, the system should be functional to include children in the next few days. Additionally, Microsoft promises to soon include services from TelaDoc, linking patients with real physicians for further assessment of their condition.

Link: Microsoft H1N1 Flu Response Center...

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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Pocket Heart, A Cardiac Anatomy Learning Tool for iPhone

eMedia Interactive Ltd. out of Galway, Ireland has released an iPhone app to help learn the anatomy of the heart. Using the Pocket Heart app, one can browse the organ in three dimensions using zoom and rotate features, identify individual components, and take quizzes to test one's knowledge. This simulator might also be helpful to medical students, residents and clinicians learning to perform echocardiography, by allowing to correlate echo images to the anatomy. So grab the Pocket Heart and head to our own EchoJournal to learn more about cardiac echoes.

Some features of the application:

1. Toggle between Interior and Exterior views of the heart. 2. Turn on and off the heartbeat. 3. Switch on and off the blood flow. 4. Navigate to a specific feature from an index option. 5. Tap on an information pin to display its name and corresponding information. 6. Test your understanding of the heart's structure and functions. 7. Save your quiz options and return at a later stage during your user-session.

Product page: Pocket Heart...

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Thursday, September 24, 2009

A Man's Head Inside Your Browser

Bill Moorier, a software developer at justin.tv, has developed a Flash based interactive browser of his latest MRI scan.

Here's his short story regarding the project:

In September 2009 my doctor recommended an MRI to rule-out a couple of potential conditions. The scan came back completely normal, which was a great relief! As a kind of cathartic exercise, and inspired by Dustin Curtis's brain tour I decided to do something with the images. I spent most of a fun weekend writing this MRI explorer. I hope you enjoy playing with it!

Link: Inside Bill Moorier's head...

(hat tip: Ryan Sager)

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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Radiopaedia Releases Practice Application for The iPhone

Radiopaedia.org, a Wiki for radiologists, has released a teaching file for the iPhone. The app contains a collection of cases to prepare for exams or simply to use as a refresher in clinical work.

Here's a screencast showing the features of the app:

Product page: Radiology Teaching file...

Flashback: Help Build Radiopaedia, a Wiki for Radiologists...

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Thursday, September 10, 2009

A-Units Helps Anesthesiologists Keep Tabs on Billing Units

If you are an American anesthesiologist, and you do your own billing, now you have a simple choice. You can either buy everyone's ~~favorite~~ old-fashioned ASA Relative Value Guide ($75/$25), and calculate your charges based on the time spend in OR and on base units, or you can buy a new slick iPhone calculator that will do the work for you.

And here's more:

A-Units was created in cooperation with a practicing anesthesiologist. A unique copyrighted UNITS calculator will help you quickly calculate your time spent and units billed per procedure. Your case details will be saved in a HISTORY folder for future reference and the specific data points will be kept for your personal analysis in a DATA page. The FAVORITES page will allow you to store your most common cases performed so you can quickly add cases without searching the extensive CPT(R) database.

A-Units contains the most current Relative Value Guide(R) and CPT database provided exclusively from the American Society of Anesthesiology (ASA) and American Medical Association (AMA). The database is easily searched by keywords or codes. Procedures can also be searched by specific body region on the BROWSE page. Once the specific procedure is located, clicking on it will bring up the calculator to allow you to input your specific case information. The Units calculator will display the CPT code and descriptor phrase along with the base units allowed for the case. Once your start and stop time is entered the calculator will quickly determine total minutes of anesthesia, time units earned and total units for the case. This is then saved to your HISTORY and DATA page for a permanent record.

iTunes links: A-Units and A-Units Lite...

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GoPubMed Version 4 Wins Design Award

GoPubMed, an innovative interface to PubMed created by Transinsight from Dresden, Germany, has recently won the coveted best of the best red dot award for communication design. The online application provides powerful sorting features to organize the information and dig through the mass of information on PubMed.

GoPubMed 4.0 is ten times faster than its predecessor, now handling millions of documents in seconds. Intelligent search: Never miss a document. The new interactive filtering process reduces millions of documents to a handful of key papers in just a few clicks. The Web 2.0 query processing helps by suggesting search ideas as you type. More document sources: The GoPubMed.com website offers searches on PubMed and the Web at no cost. The professional version of GoPubMed PRO is designed to include intranet searches and patents. Improve GoPubMed: The public website GoPubMed.com allows users to manually annotate and verify papers including their background information. The platform has already about 60.000 enthusiastic helping hands. GoPubMed shows the semantic path to the future: community generated ontologies and so improves the quality of search results.
GoPubMed PRO for corporate semantic searches can handle multiple ontologies represented in many languages. The integrated semi-automated ontology generation tool helps to create ontologies of unknown domains much faster than doing them by hand. Local intranet and desktop searches will help our customers extend the power of the semantic search technology to their local information pools which helps reduce the time needed for manual information retrieval significantly. Cutting down the average hours spent weekly (12.4) on information searches to a little more than 1 hour can be directly expressed in terms money spent.” explains Dr. Liliana Barrio-Alvers, CTO at Transinsight. “This is what our customers appreciate: greater efficiency that translates into faster and higher returns on their investments.”

Link: GoPubMed homepage...

Link: red dot award: communication design...

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Tuesday, September 8, 2009

novo|seek, The Biomedical Search Engine

If you're a power user of biomedical information on the Internet, take a look at novo|seek from Bioalma out Madrid, Spain. The search engine monitors information from a number of institutions, such as PubMed, the CDC and NIH, and data mines the material for keywords to make searching and categorizing information easier.

Extract precise information for over 3 million key biomedical concepts, no matter whether they are diseases, drugs, chemicals compounds, symptoms or genes.

Retrieve key biomedical concepts and bibliographic information to your query.

Highlight relevant biomedical concepts in the text.

Filter your results fast and easy.

Review key information derived from over thousands of documents in a single screen.

Search for an author and find key research concepts based on the analysis of his or her research.

Link to relevant external chemical and biological information.

Link: novo|seek...

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RxCalc for Pharmacokinetic Calculations on The iPhone

Here's a new iPhone application for pharmacists that "puts commonly used pharmacokinetic calculations in the palm of your hand."

From the product page:

With RxCalc you quickly compute the most commonly used pharmacokinetic calculations, including designing new vancomycin and aminoglycoside dosing regimens and patient-specific post-level adjustments to current dosing regimens. You can also finetune the recommended regimen to meet a patient's specific needs.
New Start Results

Ideal Body Weight

Dosing body weight

Creatinine Clearance

Elimination rate constant

Half-life

Volume of distribution

Dosing interval (Tau)

Estimated Dose

Simple Calculations

Ideal Body Weight

Creatinine Clearance (Cockcrot-Gault)

Current Regimens requiring post-level adjustment

Patient specific elimination rate constant

Patient specific volume of distribution

Patient specific dosing interval (Tau)

Patient specific dose

Product page: RxCalc...

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Wednesday, September 2, 2009

With AnestAssist, iPhone Now Models Anesthesia Pharmacology

Palma Healthcare Systems, a small company out of Madison, Wisconsin, has just released the AnestAssist pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling application for the iPhone. The software presents residents, anesthesiologists and intensivists with an easy to understand, and hopefully clinically useful, visual data of pharmacological behavior and drug interactions for the most commonly used anesthesia medications.

Anesthesiologists, CRNA's, and other clinicians involved with anesthesiology, from residents to the very experienced, will find AnestAssist a valuable tool for understanding and designing rational dosing strategies tailored to individual patients.
Mathematical models published by clinical researchers, which take into account patient weight, age, and gender, are used to estimate and chart:

Plasma Concentration

Effect Site Concentration

Probability of Effect (including interactions):

Analgesia: No response to laryngoscopy

Sedation: OAA/S < 2

Drugs modeled: Propofol, Remifentanil, Fentanyl, Alfentanil, and Sufentanil.

Interactions modeled: Propofol and any combination of Remifentanil, Fentanyl, Alfentanil, or Sufentanil.

Case library: design and build your own case library to record and demonstrate dosing strategies for a variety of patient types and drugs used.

Press release: Innovative PharmaPharmacodynamicaModeling Applicing Application for iPhone is a Powerful Educational and Planning Tool for Anesthesiologists...

Product page: AnestAssist...

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Tuesday, September 1, 2009

"Outbreaks Near Me": Practical Epidemiology for The iPhone

For the last three years we've been covering HealthMap, an online tool that tracks the spread of infectious disease, as reported from a number of credible sources (see flashbacks below). Now researchers from Children's Hospital Boston in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab have combined the resources of HealthMap with the networking and geolocation abilities of the iPhone to create a portable application that can keep you aware of disease outbreaks around you. The app will even raise an alarm when it realizes you, for example, entered an area with a high rate of recent reports of H1N1.

The new application also features an option for users to submit an outbreak report. This will enable individuals in cities and countries around the world to interact with the HealthMap team and participate in the public health surveillance process. Users may take photos - of situations and scenarios of, and/or leading to, disease - with their iPhone and submit them to the HealthMap system for review and eventual posting as an alert on the worldwide map.
"This is grassroots, participatory epidemiology," says HealthMap co-founder Clark Freifeld, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab and research software developer at CHIP. "In releasing this app we aim to empower citizens in the cause of public health, not only by providing ready access to real-time information, but also by encouraging them to contribute their own knowledge, expertise, and observations. In enabling participation in surveillance, we also expect to increase global coverage and identify outbreaks earlier."

Press release: New iPhone app "Outbreaks Near Me" locates H1N1 (swine flu), infectious diseases

Product page: Outbreaks Near Me

Flashbacks: Swine Flu As Spectator Sport; The Latest on HealthMap, an Online Disease-Mining System; BoingBoing Shamefully Ignores Valid Questions; More about User-Generated Content; HEALTHmap Global Disease Tracker

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