Back in July 2010, I wrote about using the Candleflame app to encourage pediatric patients to take deep breaths for a pulmonary exam. This app has also been useful in helping me roughly gauge the patient’s peak flow.
The American Medical Association (AMA) is harnassing the innovative power of the people in its “AMA App Challenge”. What do you think would be the perfect app for medical students, residents, and/or practicing physicians in their day-to-day life?
This challenge is the perfect opportunity for all those with great app ideas but are too busy (or lazy) to do the technical, legal, and business groundwork to make the idea a reality. The down side is that once you submit the idea, AMA has full proprietary ownership of it.
Ever since my post about the top medical apps, I have been inundated with people asking me to review their apps. One has stood out.
Medibabble is a real-time medical translation app and is now available for FREE. It was created by two innovative UCSF medical school graduates, Dr. Alex Blau and Dr. Brad Cohn. This app contains an extensive preset list of history questions and physical exam commands. When you click on a sentence, the app will translate and speak the sentence in one of 5 languages (Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian, and Haitian Creole).
So, I volunteered to give a talk for the UCSF Office of Graduate Medical Education WAAAAY back in early 2010 on “There’s an App for That: Key Smart Phone Applications for Surviving Residency“. Somehow the lecture date has snuck up on me and it’s next Tuesday! I thought it was a small gathering, but it turns out it’s not. Plus, I keep getting school-wide emails reminding all the residents and fellows to attending!
How do you teach pediatric patients, especially toddlers, how to cooperate with your pulmonary exam? How do you get them to take adequately deep breaths in and out?
I recently came across a new means of online teaching and information delivery called sketchcasting. The premise isn’t new. It combines a podcast (someone speaking) with visuals (images). In sketchcasting, the images are instead someone drawing on a virtual whiteboard in real-time to convey information.
I recently found a sketchcast with stop-motion and speed-up effects, which really made the presentation dynamic and super-engaging. This sketchcast by Dan Pink (Author of “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”) was created by the Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).
Occasionally, I get a rare – “Hey congrats on the article!” comment from residents or students. It’s usually in reference to my ACEP News column that comes out every 3 months on Tricks of the Trade. However, I got about 3 shout-outs in the past 2 days. How odd.
Then I saw one of our office staff who was reading EM News. “Hey cool!” she said. Totally confused, I realized that I was quoted on the front page of this week’s publication about iPhone applications in EM. Many months ago, I had done a brief telephone interview with the writer.