Thursday, May 17, 2012

Stanford medical students launch iPhone app to help physicians keep current on research

I can't tell if laypersons could get this also. Someone in the medical stroke world will need to suggest that stroke research and rehab be summarized also.
http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2012/05/stanford-medical-students-launch-iphone-app-to-help-physicians-keep-current-on-research/
As evidence-based medicine takes a greater foothold, medical residents and physicians are tasked with the seemingly constant challenge of staying up to date on the latest treatments and drugs. To help their colleagues keep current on medical advancements, Stanford medical residents Dave Iberri, MD, and Manuel Lam, MD, introduced a new medical app that features physician-written summaries of landmark clinical trials.
Lam, a third-year resident with an undergraduate degree in computer science, and Iberri, a second-year resident and an experienced web developer, carved out time from their busy clinical schedules to develop the recently released Journal Club for iPhone (link to iTunes store).
Below Iberri, a second-year medical resident, discusses the motivation for creating the app and how the Stanford medical center community helped shape the final product.
What spurred the creation of this product?
As medical trainees, we furiously jotted down medical acronyms in our notebooks hoping to read these articles on post-call days. But early on we realize that wading through the sea of medicine journals can be overwhelming, if not downright impossible. In the midst of our resident schedules, how can we digest all this content? Which articles should be at the top of our reading list? Passionate about medical education, Manny and I wanted to solve this problem. We sought to put answers at the clinician’s fingertips, immediately accessible at the point of care. Since smartphones, and the iPhone in particular, are revolutionizing the way medicine in practiced, deciding to design an iPhone app was a no-brainer. Thus the Journal Club. Written by physicians, these article summaries are distilled into bite-size morsels that clinicians can digest quickly. Think of it as CliffsNotes for medical research.

The rest at the link.

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