Archive for the ‘Differential Diagnosis’ Category

IDdx from USBMIS

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

USBMIS recently released their new title IDdx, which means Infectious Disease differential diagnosis. The app is based on the popular infectious disease reference, Control of Communicable Disease Manual.

This is the ultimate differential diagnosis app design that we have been waiting for …

See how it looks on Windows Mobile;

As we can see above there are two main buttons, one for diseases and another for symptoms. So we can either search by diseases and we’ll get all the symptoms and signs associated with that disease or on the other hand we can diagnosticate by adding the symptoms and see which diseases may cause those symptoms.

Not only that but even there are several filters like choosing whether the disease should have all of the symptoms together or any of them and also we can choose the chronicity and some epidemiological factors.

The user interface is fantastic and the logic behind the design is unmatched by any other differential diagnosis program that we have seen so far for the PDA. In fact, this is exactly what we dreamed of a year ago.

However, one glitch we’d like to see it fixed in future versions which is the replacement of the alphabetical listing of the ddx disease list by one that is ranked from commonest to rarest. This way it will truly be a complete infectious disease secret weapon on the bedside.

Also the app can be enormously enhanced if they add lab values data input in the ddx generation and interlinking with other USBMIS titles did not work appropriately. In addition, it would be great if they make an iPhone version and if the Palm and Windows Mobile installation be little easier with less registration steps.

IDdx can be purchased or downloaded as free trial directly from the USBMIS website

For further details check the IDdx Pda4peds review.

IDdx is listed in the infectious disease Pda4eds best app polls. Vote for it there!

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Posted in All, Differential Diagnosis, Infectious Diseases | No Comments »

Diagnosaurus DDx on iPhone

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Here comes another app from Unbound Medicine, but this time they learned the game.. They are offering it at a low price so as to compete with the incredibly low prices that are seen in App store.

Diagnosaurus can be downloaded for only $0.99 from App store, Click here to download it.

Here’s how it looks;

Diagnosaurus is offered for free for the Palm and Windows Mobile [go to download page] [read Pda4peds review] and it should have been free here also, but anyway nobody can complain about 99 cents.

The previous models from Unbound Medicine was in much higher prices such as Davis Drug Guide and Nursing Central. Probably they are experimenting with Diagnosaurus to see which model is going to work better. So far, all the iTunes reviews are positive for Diagnosaurus after 24 hours of its launch. Some reviewers of Davis Drug Guide have reacted negatively to the need to purchase content after downloading the free application, despite the company’s clear explanation of the subscription process on the app description. With Diagnosaurus you pay 99 cents via the App Store and that’s it.

It replicates the Unbound Medicine platform that we have seen so far in all of their apps, to the extent that they offer a link to online user guide which is the same for all of the apps. The platform features wireless updates [which is not so helpful for a static ebook such as Diagnosaurus!], multiple indexes, smooth navigation, crisp pages and an enjoyable user experience.

Diagnosaurus DDx is a simple listing of symptoms with their causes and related alternative DDx differential diagnoses, and it’s mainly composed of adult medicine material and no pediatric focus. For example, we don’t find febrile seizures, or infantile crying and the causes of GI hemorrhages are mainly in adult life.

However, it can be useful sometimes as it includes commonly encountered symptoms and presentations such as abdominal pain and electrolytes disturbances.

The app is Not a differential diagnosis analyzer and we cannot enter multiple symptoms to get the DDx list.

Our message to Unbound Medicine, is that “We love the price“.

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Posted in All, Differential Diagnosis, iPhone | No Comments »

Diagnosaurus DDx on iPhone

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Here comes another app from Unbound Medicine, but this time they learned the game.. They are offering it at a low price so as to compete with the incredibly low prices that are seen in App store.

Diagnosaurus can be downloaded for only $0.99 from App store, Click here to download it.

Here’s how it looks;

Diagnosaurus is offered for free for the Palm and Windows Mobile [go to download page] [read Pda4peds review] and it should have been free here also, but anyway nobody can complain about 99 cents.

The previous models from Unbound Medicine was in much higher prices such as Davis Drug Guide and Nursing Central. Probably they are experimenting with Diagnosaurus to see which model is going to work better. So far, all the iTunes reviews are positive for Diagnosaurus after 24 hours of its launch. Some reviewers of Davis Drug Guide have reacted negatively to the need to purchase content after downloading the free application, despite the company’s clear explanation of the subscription process on the app description. With Diagnosaurus you pay 99 cents via the App Store and that’s it.

It replicates the Unbound Medicine platform that we have seen so far in all of their apps, to the extent that they offer a link to online user guide which is the same for all of the apps. The platform features wireless updates [which is not so helpful for a static ebook such as Diagnosaurus!], multiple indexes, smooth navigation, crisp pages and an enjoyable user experience.

Diagnosaurus DDx is a simple listing of symptoms with their causes and related alternative DDx differential diagnoses, and it’s mainly composed of adult medicine material and no pediatric focus. For example, we don’t find febrile seizures, or infantile crying and the causes of GI hemorrhages are mainly in adult life.

However, it can be useful sometimes as it includes commonly encountered symptoms and presentations such as abdominal pain and electrolytes disturbances.

The app is Not a differential diagnosis analyzer and we cannot enter multiple symptoms to get the DDx list.

Our message to Unbound Medicine, is that “We love the price“.

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Posted in All, Differential Diagnosis, iPhone | No Comments »

The Merck Manual Suite from Unbound Medicine

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

The famous Merck Manual is now offered from Unbound Medicine in a new format and in a bundle of symptoms and drugs resources.

The original Merck Manual was previously offered from Unbound Medicine as a stand-alone PDA product, but recently they have added two optional resources to the package; These are the Merck Manual with patient symptoms and Davis Drug Guide for physicians.

So let’s see how it looks on Windows Mobile:

The solution is available for Palm, Pocket PC, Blackberry, and also as a wireless website and a regular website [check it out here http://www.unboundmedicine.com/merckmanual/ub] all for one annual subscription price. If only the manual it is $50; if you add the symptoms guide it is $60; and if want the Davis Drug guide added then it’s $80. The website amusingly includes “topic of the week” to engage the visitor.

The real addition here is the Merck Manual with Patient Symptoms as we have already seen the other two products before; check the Davis Drug Guide and the Merck Manual Pda4peds reviews.

So the patient symptoms is essentially a list of commonly encountered symptoms each being detailed in etiology, pathophysiology, evaluation, treatment, and key points. Many of the symptoms are appropriately addressed to pediatric practitioners for example cough in children and constipation in children and even a topic about crying.

There is also a wireless update button that will allow us to update the contents [bimonthly for the Merck Manual and more frequently for Davis] and also to send search queries to our online account. Sounds great right!

However, there were many missing features that we wished to see in this reference, here’s a list

  • There is no real differential diagnosis generator and so it can not be counted as a real DDx app.
  • Many clinical presentations are missing, for example you don’t have hypokalemia or abnormal tendon reflexes. There are only symptoms and the most common ones only.
  • Still many of the symptoms are adult-only, for example there’s no headache in children or pediatric GI bleeding entries.
  • Some entries found in the original reference are not listed in the patient symptoms even when they are perfect symptom topics for example Bruxism.
  • There is yet no native iPhone app for this title, although we can perfectly visit the wireless website on our iPhone’s and iTouch’s Safari.

Hopefully we will see big improvements in future versions of this suite.

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Posted in All, All-in-one Applications, Differential Diagnosis | 4 Comments »

What is The Best Differential Diagnosis Program ?

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

One of the wonderful functions of PDAs is the potential to have a program that produce a list of differential diagnoses for a given clinical feature(s). Developers realized this fact and created for us a number of DDx programs. For a list of these programs see this Pda4peds category.

You may also vote for your best differential diagnosis tool.

Such applications can be classified into:

1) single symptom lookup: i.e. the user enter a symptom, sign, lab result and will get a list of causes (differential diagnosis) for that symptom.

2) multiple symptoms analysis: i.e. the user enter multiple symptoms, signs, lab results and will get a list of differential diagnoses for that combination. This type can be further subclassified into:

2a) additive generators: the program will list all the diseases that may have symptom A and all the diseases that may have symptom B. Such a program will give the longest list of results and could not be very specific.

2b) subtractive generators: the program will list only the diseases that have both symptom A and B. Such a program will give highly specific results but may miss conditions if the database of clinical features is not big enough.

So The Ideal DDx Program would be;

1) Class 2b, with comprehensive database that include every possible clinical feature (no matter how rare it is) for every disease in the world.

2) Patient Specific, the program takes into account other patient’s parameter such as age, sex, ethnicity, location, and duration of symptoms and modifies the results accordingly. This is specially important for us pediatricians.

3) Arranged Results, the generated list is arranged from the most common to the rarest possibilty.

4) Interactive, asks the user further details in order to narrow the diagnosis see Epocrates Sx as an example.

Posted in All, Differential Diagnosis | No Comments »

Epocrates Essentials Deluxe

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

Here comes another offer from Epocrates, the Epocrates Essentials Deluxe..

In addition to the superb package of Epocrates Essentials with all it’s rich features and services they added two more new products Epocrates Medical Dictionary with more than 100,000 medical terms and Epocrates Coder with the ability to look up ICD codes by category, keyword, or code number.

The Epocrates package is once more proving to be an all-in-one product that enables us to look up almost everything in one application and one interface.

For Epocrates Essentials Pda4peds Review Click Here

For Epocrates Essentials Deluxe Pda4peds Review Click Here

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Posted in All, All-in-one Applications, Calculators, Converters, Tools, Differential Diagnosis, Drug Guides, News | No Comments »