dr-exmedic.com

After buying my Palm Tungsten E2, I quickly grew to love the thing.  It kept track of my schedule and had thousands of applications (we called them programs, back then) available, many for free, including many useful medical tools.  Ever since the iPhone started running software (aka “apps”), I’ve been longing for something that would combine my phone, Palm, and my MP3 player into one device.  Just over a month ago, I remained convinced that Palm would be the company to provide that–particularly since there is an emulator that would ease any transition by allowing me to run all of my existing Palm programs.

My mind was changed by fear that Palm Pre sales haven’t been high enough to stimulate software development, and impatience that it was only available on Sprint’s lousy network.  My wife and I now own Motorola Droids.

Now I’m in a bind:  no way to run my old Palm programs (without carrying the thing around), and few really good medical references available (there are a few things in Android market, and a few web pages formatted for mobile phones–but that latter is only really useful when you have internet service, isn’t it?).  However, there is light at the end of the tunnel that is Android medical software:

• Skyscape has ported pretty much everything they have to Android, though the free drug reference isn’t very good.  The medical calculator isn’t half bad–I’ve used the Palm version and liked it.
• AvivoNet has a $3 medical calculator that doesn’t look half bad (although it doesn’t do calculations in portrait mode); it has pneumonia scores that aren’t available on the free Archimedes offered by Skyscape.
• Everybody’s perennial favorite Epocrates plans to release an Android version by year’s end.
• The folks behind WISER submitted a beta version to the Google Developer Challenge.
• PEPID isn’t cheap, but is also developing an Android version of its software.

Basically, I’m hoping that I’ll have a truly functional medical PDA again within 6 months.  I’d like to have it sooner than that, but I’m not holding my breath.

Filed under: EMS, Emergency Medicine