John Halamka recently wrote a post about mobile applications for medical education on his blog, Life as a Healthcare CIO. Every year the Harvard Medical School medical students get a survey about their use mobile devices. The students are allowed to use whatever mobile device they choose/buy and then HMS supports all of these devices with software licenses and “controlled hosted applications.”
Wow! Many institutions do not give their students or employees such broad leeway in selecting mobile devices, I’m impressed. Many colleges support a couple of devices and many hospitals do not support anything but a very specific make and model of a device (often some specific type of Blackberry). Additionally, many hospitals don’t do much support or coordination of online medical apps for its employees. Usually the doctor or nurse is on their own.
However at HMS, students can access the mobile resources from their learning management system and can download the applications. So what are the most popular applications among the HMS students?
John lists them.
- Dynamed
- Unbound Medicine uCentral
- VisualDX Mobile
- Epocrates Essentials
- iRadiology
For anyone who is starting to get involved in mobile applications, this is could be a good starting point list of resources to investigate and possibly add. I look forward to when John posts the complete 2011 mobile applications survey.