Smartphone tip for medical students

Here is a very simply tip for medical students who carry smartphones in the hospital: carry an external battery pack in your white coat pocket so that you can charge your smartphone. Inevitably, your smartphone battery will go low. You may be looking for a USB port or power outlet to charge your phone, but then you may quickly get called off to see a patient or attend to a Code Blue emergency in the hospital. It's not worth leaving your phone plugged in somewhere.

Keep the battery in your pocket. If your senior resident needs a quick charge, you'll quickly become a hit by offering an easy way to recharge.

"Residency Rater" app for pediatrics (for medical students)

If you know any medical students interested in pediatrics, make sure they know about this app:

Residency Rater - Pediatrics is designed for fourth year medical students entering pediatrics. The program allows students to record impressions, strengths, and weaknesses of different residency programs. As medical students consider pediatrics programs, they may choose residencies from the application's list. Users rate each program on a scale of 1 to 5 in a wide variety of different criteria. Criteria are divided into categories including work environment, curriculum, clinical interests, residents, faculty, and technology.

Users may delete criteria that are not of interest, may 'star' criteria to double the weight of specific interests, and may add additional criteria of their own in each category. When a criterion's rating slider remains at zero, that criteria is not included in the rating. At any time, users may email their ratings and program lists to themselves or others.

Get it on iTunes here.

iPhone and iPad in medicine teaching and clinical practice: Medicine 2.0 #med2

I'm here at Medicine 2.0 and I'm attending a session titled, "iPhone and iPad in medicine and health sciences: experiences in teaching and clinical practice." Here I am at Stanford where medical students are using iPads in the classroom. The presenter was Rhoda Weiss-Lambrou, Professor of occupational therapy at the School of Rehabilitation, Faculty of medicine, Université de Montréal.

Mobile tools like the iPhone and iPad are being used by medical students and health care professionals. In particular, hospitals and adopting these mobile devices to improve communication, collaboration, or networking. Mobile learning is driving greater interaction and participation. In the rehabilitation setting, clinicians are using mobile features as therapeutic tools with patients.

During the presentation, the speaker spoke about useful online resources like Facebook, Dropbox, YouTube, SlideShare, Wikipedia, and others. Students in the health professions are using these Web 2.0 tools to enhance their educational experience and to share their information with other students.

This is the last week for medical students to get Epocrates for free!

You have until August 14, 2011 to download your FREE subscription of Epocrates® Essentials, our premium drug, disease and diagnostic mobile reference suite. Also, share your opinion in our annual Future Physicians of America survey and enter for a chance to win prizes like an Apple® iPad® 2 or one of five $100 American Express® gift cards.

Plus, we’re giving you a free copy of Clemente’s Anatomy Flash Cards for your iPhone®, iPod touch® or iPad®.

Currently using Epocrates Essentials on your mobile device? This will extend your subscription by a year.

More information here.

Med Students! Get Epocrates Essentials for Free - Limited Time!

Author: Brittany Chan, MBA


Attention med students! For the first two weeks of August only, you can get the Epocrates Essentials app, normally $159 for a one-year subscription, for FREE. It's one of my favorite apps for clinical rotations. I just upgraded for free and can't wait to try out all the new features, including information about drugs, dosing, diseases, treatments, and lab interpretation.

This app is available for iPod touch/iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile platforms.

Get it here.

Sundry Notes (great for medical students)

Sundry Notes is a nice productivity app that can help you  stay organized with all of your notes. Here's some additional information:

Write, draw, research, record and share! Take notes of any kind and use the built-in Evernote + Dropbox + Google Docs + Facebook integration. The ultimate multi-media note taking application!

* Write text
* Draw anywhere
* Search the internet
* Import PDFs+Images
* Import from Evernote + Google + Dropbox
* Record audio
* Bookmarks
* Tabs

learn more here.

iStudiez Pro for medical students (iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch)

If you're a medical student, you may want to think about using iStudiez Pro as you study for your exams. This is a great tool that can help you leverage mobile technology as you're going through medical school. iStudiez can help you organize your schedule, keep up with homework and assignments, and stay on top of your grades.

If you're on a tight budget, then you can get iStudiez Lite for free.

You can learn about iStudiez here.

Free Lexi-COMPLETE for AMSA members (medical students)

Limited time offer for AMSA members!
Ends January 15

Download Lexi-COMPLETE™ for your mobile device and enjoy 6 months FREE!

Comprehensive and easy-to-use, Lexi-COMPLETE – our top-rated package for smartphones/PDAs – provides medical students like you mobile access to the most trusted drug information on the market.

Plus, unlike our competitors’ content, our information is unbiased and pharma-free!

Here are just a few of the benefits medical students love about Lexi-COMPLETE:

* Unbiased, pharma-free medical reference
* User-friendly, intuitive interface
* Information on pharmacology of drugs
* More comprehensive and accurate than free resources

Learn more here.

Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy (for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry)

This is a great app for first-year medical students. Why didn't I have this when I was in medical school?

Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy is the most revered and best-selling anatomy atlas in the English language.

Available on: iPhone/iPod touch/iPad, Android, Blackberry, Palm and more...

Author(s): Frank H. Netter, MD

Key Features

* Over 532 detailed drawings that allow you to learn structures with confidence
* With Skyscape Hotspots, you can tap on spots pointing to various parts of an image and get help identifying the structures shown
* New radiographs, computed tomographic (CT) images, CT angiograms, and magnetic resonance (MR) images

Learn more here.

Cramberry: Create & study flash cards online (for medical students and Board Prep)

If you're a medical student and you're preparing for the end of the semester, use your smartphone to study. Cramberry is a great app that will help you develop flash cards that you can use on your mobile device.

So, whether you're a medical student or a physician preparing to take the Boards, leverage your mobile device to help you learn. Currently, Cramberry is available for the Apple iPhone, the iPod touch, and the iPad.

You can learn about Cramberry here.

Last day to get Epocrates Essentials for free

If you're a U.S. medical student, you can get Epocrates Essentials for free. That's right, FREE! But, today is the last day for this promotion. To learn more, visit:

http://www.epocrates.com/ma/FreeforMedicalStudents2010/

Lexi-Comp discount for medical students

AMSA (American Medical Student Association) has partnered with Lexi-Comp - a leading provider of medication information and clinical content for the healthcare industry - to provide medical students with the most up-to-date and unbiased drug information on the market for a fraction of the price. Free from pharmaceutical influence, Lexi-Comp's content gives you access to the objective medical reference material you need when you need it.

AMSA Member Packages

Take advantage of huge savings when you purchase any of Lexi-Comp's three discounted AMSA member packages:

• Lexi-COMPLETE™
• Lexi-CLINICAL SUITE™
• Lexi-Drugs® & Lexi-Interact™

Residency Rater for the iPhone & iPod Touch

The University of Wisconsin Department of Family Medicine has a great app for medical students.

Residency Rater is designed for fourth year medical students entering family medicine. The app allows students to record impressions, strengths, and weaknesses of different residency programs.

Users can select and rate each residency program on a scale of 1 to 5 in a wide variety of different criteria. Criteria are divided into categories including work environment, curriculum, clinical interests, residents, faculty, and technology.

Features

* Choose from an extensive list of Family Medicine Residency Programs
* Rating criteria based on the American Academy of Family Physicians' "Strolling through the Match" checklist
* Customizable criteria - add or delete criteria, select which criteria to make active/inactive
* Double the weight of specific criteria
* Enter you own notes
* Generate reports and export data

To learn more about residency rater and to download this free app, click here.

Free Epocrates Essentials for U.S. medical students

Epocrates is giving away Epocrates Essentials to U.S. Medical Students, but you have to act quickly because this offer ends on August 31.

Here are the details:

We are giving you Epocrates® Essentials* ($159 value) FREE. Our #1 premium mobile application offers the drug, disease, and diagnostic tools you need at the point-of-care. Act fast and tell your friends – it's free for the rest of August only!

How do you get it? Follow the instructions posted here:
http://www.epocrates.com/ma/FreeforMedicalStudents2010/

*Epocrates Essentials is compatible with iPhone®/iPod® touch, BlackBerry®, Palm OS® and Windows® Mobile platforms.

PLEASE NOTE: Medical students who activate the free Epocrates Essentials code must be attending an accredited United States medical school. Epocrates reserves the right to request a valid form of student identification for additional proof of enrollment.

Budget smartphone options for medical students

Many medical students are on tight budgets. Let's face it. You've accumulated loans, you're not working, and you're probably accumulating more loans as you're going through medical school. Who has the luxury to buy the latest and greatest smartphone?

If you're a medical student and you're thinking about purchasing a smartphone, consider this: you'll probably end up getting a new smartphone when you start residency. Therefore, you should not be too eager to buy the latest and greatest smartphone. You mainly need a solid device that will meet your needs for a few years. Then, when you actually start making some money as a resident (it won't be much, but it's more than now), then you can buy a newer, nicer smartphone.

Smartphone prices have been coming down dramatically. If you're on AT&T, you can get an iPhone 3GS for just $99. Want an Android smartphone? The Motorola BackFlip is only $49.99 on AT&T. AT&T also offers several different BlackBerry smartphones that are free for new customers.

Verizon used to have some great budget smartphones, but they've recently changed their inventory to make room for the newer smartphones like the Motorola Droid X and the upcoming Droid 2. However, the LG Ally running Google Android is only $49.99 and the Motorola Devour running Google Android is just $79.99. Those are some practical options for medical students who wish to have an Android smartphone but who don't want to pay more than $100. The Palm Pre Plus is only $49.99 and the BlackBerry Curve is going for $29.99.

Looking for better deals? If you search on eBay, you'll probably find some great bargains as people try to sell their smartphones so that they can upgrade to better devices.

Great deals on the Apple iPhone 3GS

As you may have suspected, AT&T now has some good deals on the iPhone 3GS and I'm sure that prices will continue to fall as customers choose the iPhone 4. This is great news for medical students and residents who are on a tight budget. If you don't need all the latest and greatest features found on the iPhone 4, then the 3GS is an exceptional phone that is very fast and still runs iOS 4 (and is capable of multitasking).

Tip: Go with a refurbished iPhone 3GS and you'll save even more.

Medical students leveraging podcasts for lectures

You don't need an Apple iPhone or an iPod to listen to podcasts on your smartphone or PDA. However, given that this story is on the Apple website, let's see how medical students at Ohio State University are listening to medical lectures as podcasts.

Justin Harper, a medical student at Ohio State University, championed the concept of using an iPod touch as an educational tool for medical students. Now, the first two years of the Ohio State medical school’s lectures are now available on iTunes U. Medical students can now access these lectures while they're at the gym, walking outside, or while they're driving.

Read the full case report here on the Apple website.

Medical students discussing smartphones

On the Student Doctor Network, tech-loving medical students are busy discussing smartphones trends in the Technology/PDA forum. Some of the hot topics include:

• Pics of new iPhone 4th Gen  (yes, even busy medical students are keeping up with the latest rumors!)
• iPhone Medical Apps
• DROID vs. iPhone
• Ads on the iPhone
• iPad
• Medical apps for Android

Medical students are using smartphones for so many things these days. If you're on call, perhaps you're watching TV on your smartphone. Maybe you're texting someone during rounds but you're pretending to research a medical condition. How often do you get pimped by residents and attendings who want you to quickly look something up on your smartphone?

Given how quickly smartphone trends are changing, I'm sure that medical students are being challenged to keep up with the latest and greatest smartphones that are coming out these days. New apps and devices are being released all the time. However, if you're someone who likes to stay current on this type of technology, then maybe you'll impress your senior resident or attending with your smartphone knowledge. They'll be calling you the "smartphone expert." That would look nice on your recommendation letter, wouldn't it?

Discussing smartphones with MD/MBA students

I'm in Boston this weekend covering the MD/MBA meeting (click here for meeting highlights from the Association of MD/MBA Programs 8th Annual Conference). Sure enough, my discussions with medical students start with us talking about non-clinical career opportunities, but then the discussion evolves into smartphones and health IT. They're asking me about the iPhone and about the Android OS. Tonight, I had a chance to tell one medical student that you can now use Epocrates on Android (still in beta, but it works!).

Today's medical students have so much power in their hands because of modern smartphone technology. Whether you're in an MD program or a joint (dual degree) MD/MBA program, the smartphone is a necessity these days. Medical students recognize the need to find information at the point-of-care and also to stay connected wirelessly (is that even a word?).

If you're interested in the  Association of MD/MBA Programs 8th Annual Conference, make sure to follow highlights from the meeting at NonClinicalJobs.com.

GPS-Enabled Apps for Med Students

This is a guest post by Greg Bartlett. Contact me if you'd like to submit a guest post for MedicalSmartphones.com.

GPS systems have certainly come a long way in the past decade—who’d have thought military-grade tracking devices would be built into consumer telephones by now? Technological whiplash aside, the smartphone’s GPS system will do little good without some solid apps to take advantage. Here are a few suggestions for today’s med student on the go:

A medical campus can be a difficult place to navigate. iGO My Way may remedy this need. This route planning app for the iPhone and iPod Touch features one of the most attractive and intuitive interfaces on the market today. The hefty $55 price tag seems reasonable once its clear, up-to-date maps and global support are examined. For those in a large metro area who would prefer a cab, try Cab4Me, a slick little app that can be used on the Android’s GPS system to automatically place a call to the nearest taxi company.

To every student out there that simply can’t remember to set their phone to vibrate before class, here’s a solution: Locale. This app for Android lets the student choose different power or ringer settings for different coordinates as detected by their personal GPS system. For instance, a student can program their smartphone to switch to vibrate whenever on campus, but automatically switch back to the previous ringtone once they are back on the road.