Oct 4
2016
3 Free Medical Apps You Need to Be Using Right Now
Guest post by Kathy Finsterle, editor, Remington College.
Whether you’re a student in school to become a medical assistant or already working in the field, we can bet that you’ve had a question or two that wasn’t easily answered by an instructor or coworker. The beauty of education and training today is that when that happens you needn’t spend hours flipping through books and manuals to find the information.
While it’s always best to have your questions answered “from the horse’s mouth,” these free medical apps can help put your mind at ease and get you an answer in a pinch.
Epocrates is the #1 medical reference app and go to mobile tool for U.S. physicians and medical providers. It’s hard to believe that it’s free with all of the features it offers. Through the app you can:
- Look up OTC and name/brand drug information
- Identify potential drug interactions
- Access news and up to date research
- Perform drug calculations
- athena text messaging
athenatext messaging might be the most interesting feature of this app. You can set up a texting service within your care group to share images and communicate with people in your office about patients while still adhering to HIPAA laws.
Medscape is a similar alternative to Epocrates that has many of the same features in an easy to use design. One thing that sets it apart from Epocrates is that it is not just one app but a family of three that each serves a slightly different purpose.
Medscape
- Look up OTC and name/brand drug information
- Identify Interactions
- Perform Drug Calculations
Medscape Medplus News App
- Get up to date news related to your field of specialty
- Follow medical trends and share information with your followers
- Search topics and personalize what’s shown to you
Medscape CME and Education App
- Earn CME/CE credit directly from the app
- Train with a variety of formats including video and audio
- Track your continuing education progress
Figure1 is a relatively new app that can be likened to Instagram in the sense that it allows users to scroll through hundreds of images and use hashtags to search. You can look up diseases and conditions using medical terms as hashtags to see what they look like. You can also upload images and post comments to those uploaded by other people. It is a great tool for sharing visuals between doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers.
If you’re concerned with patient privacy, rest assured the app has already taken measures to protect users from consequences related to HIPAA. They do not post any pictures that include identifying marks like tattoos or people’s faces and they have geolocation disabled so the picture could have come from anywhere.
By having access to several different medical apps, you’ll be able to demonstrate knowledge to your employer that goes above and beyond what you may have learned in school or on the job. Pretty soon, people will be coming to you for answers and you won’t need to look them up anymore. Continue to learn and practice your skills and expect to have even more and more success as a medical assistant.