Nothing is as easy as counting calories or timing contractions with your smart phone. And apps are even in doctors' bags these days!

An April 2010 estimate placed the number of iPhone apps at almost 185,000 and according to data from AdMob, the rapidly growing app market is worth nearly two and a half billion dollars a year. Health professionals have iPhones too, so that it's no wonder that a lot of apps have been developed especially for these users. Rather than just a fun gadget, the smart phone and its medical apps have become an important tool for the doctor of today. [1][2]

According to a recent review in the journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases, “Modern technology has revolutionized the clinician's ability to have vast information resources available literally at one's fingertips. The advent of the smartphone-an integration of the mobile phone with an ultraportable computer, web browser, multimedia player, and camera, has given clinicians the capability to merge their information and communication resources into one compact handheld instrument." [3]

Another review article in Healthcare Informatics predicts the future of medical apps: "Many innovative organizations are looking to provide access to electronic records and other clinical data through smartphones. Plans are already being formulated to leverage the devices to facilitate patient handoff and sign-out, as well as to link charge capture with quality measures. Cutting-edge organizations are looking to create actionable information for clinicians through software that can analyze data, track patients' progress, and send out alerts when conditions worsen." [4]

We have compiled a list of some of our favorite apps for both the consumer as well as the health professional. The list is relatively short compared to what is available. The apps described here are usually for the iPhone, iPod and iPad but there are similar apps for the other phone operating systems. The best thing to do is try out the free apps first, then move on to the paid apps. Some apps are also available for a free try out for a limited period of time. [5][6]

Health

Personal Health Records (PHRs)

ExpressWELL - Cost: $0.99, helps you manage your personal medical information. It’s designed to be used when you visit your doctor, as an at-a-glance summary of your critical medical history, and as a reference tool throughout your visit. It’s so simple to use that it’s silly not to use it.

MyHealth - Cost $0.99, makes it easy to store and retrieve the information doctors typically request in order to provide you with the kind of care you deserve.

My Life Record- Cost: $49.99, allows you to keep track of your medical records like never before possible. Everything from medical imaging, charts, medications and even lab results can now be accessed and shared all via your iPhone. Never before has your officialmedical record been so easy to organize and track. My Medical - Cost $1.99 keeps track of your personal medical information in one convenient place.

My Personal Health Record- Cost: Free, is a secure and confidential service that allows users to keep health information organized, accurate and in one place.

SOS 4 Life - Cost: L3.49, stores and translates your health and medical data into 10 languages perfect for travellers with existing or new medical conditions. So, when in Rome, you'll do what the Romans do!

Nutrition & Weight Loss

Calorie Abacus - Cost: $1.99, is a useful and fun application that allows you to design your own meals to help you wisely manage your calorie intake. Containing a nutritional database of different foods, it’s a perfect tool to estimate the calorie value of the meals you consume and recipes you prepare.

Calorie Tracker - Cost: $2.99, carries the big LIVESTRONG name, is a great companion to the DailyPlate, and gets access to a much bigger number of restaurants. Weight, calorie intake, and exercise are all taken into consideration. A minus is that WiFi is needed to access the big databases.

Cooking Capsules- Cost: Free, is a cooking helper app that is really unique. This app doesn't just offer you up recipes and leave you to it, it actually breaks down each recipe they list into three separate parts to make the entire process entertaining and easy.

GoMeals - Cost: Free, helps you as the company states "make better meal choices at home or on the go" including nutritional information, finding restaurants and tracking your food intake. And this app is especially valuable for chronic health conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure.

iWeight Deluxe - Cost: $0.99, released in May 2009  helps track your weight and reach your weight goal. It comes with a calendar that can store data on weight, exercise, calories and water intake. Extras include gym location info and other relevant health topics. Reviewers think this is “not a bad program to keep your dieting and exercise trends organized and can be a useful tool for someone trying to lose or gain weight”  but there is room for better details.

Nutrition menu - Cost: $9.99, provides all the nutritional info you ever want about common food items - calories, fat, carbs, sugar, protein, sodium and fiber – are all in this app. This is also for those who love to eat out but want to plan calorie intake in advance as it contains more than 33,000 menus from more than 320 restaurants in the U.S. and Canada. It tracks your calorie intake but not your weight. A plus is that you don’t need a WiFi connection.

Restaurant Nutrition - Cost: Free, allows a user to easily view nutritional information about restaurant menus and track what they have eaten. It can also synchronize their personal meal entries with the internet web site thePHRnetwork.com.

VegOut- Cost: $2.99, every vegetarian knows that eating out can be a difficult task. VegOut makes this task easier by providing you with the world's largest international listing of vegan, vegetarian and vegetarian-friendly restaurants at your finger tips.

Weightbot - Cost: $1.99, is simpler than the similarly priced iWeight as it only focuses on weight gain or loss. There are no tips on nutrition, calories or exercise. A plus however is the fact that it is available in 11 different languages.

Fitness and exercise

AllSport GPS - Cost: $4.99, consumers can use their GPS-enabled cell phones to navigate trails and highways, track their fitness performance, geocache, and create, manage and share those experiences with others.

BuddyRunner- Cost: Free, provides the capabilities of an expensive GPS enabled personal trainer on your Android phone. Buddy Runner allows you to monitor each run by recording your distance, pace, time, elevation, and route. A personal dashboard is created for viewing, analyzing and sharing your progress.

CardioTrainer - Cost: Free, is a next-generation mobile fitness application that can be your virtual training partner for running, biking, hiking, skiing or just about any outdoor activity you can imagine.

Fitness Builder- Cost: $9.99, is the most comprehensive fitness database in the world. It contains the largest library of exercise images & videos, the most challenging workouts across all disciplines, access to a live personal trainer and a complete set of every fitness tool, calculator and tracking feature available.

Fitnio - Cost: $4.99, is a running app with big fonts which is more readable while running. The run mapping seems to be better than RunKeeper and it has an extra feature which calculates calories burned. However, it lacks the blow-by-blow info features and cool graphs of RunKeeper.

iFitness- Cost: $1.99, gives pictures and instructions on more than 130 exercise and exercise regimes. By identifying your problem areas, the software can recommend a personalized fitness training program for you.

IMapMy - Cost: Free, is an app for bikers and runners which helps them track their exercise complete with maps and GPS. However, when using GPS, the app doesn't have enough battery life for long biking trips.

iNewLeaf - Cost:  By subscription with various rates up to $179.95US annually,  takes the results of your metabolic data (via eNewleaf.com) and turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a fitness tracker/monitor. Your workouts, heart rate zones, caloric expenditures are automatically synced when you set up your iNewLeaf account. iRunXstream - Cost: $3.99 is an iPhone app which utilizes the iPhone 3G to give you a comprehensive log of your running activities. iRunXtream is a detailed runner log to help you keep track of your running, biking and walking performance.

Pocket Workout- Cost: $4.99, is designed for people on the go, Pocket Workout is a unique personal training system that utilizes highly-effective calisthenic exercises and routines.

RunKeeper - Cost: Free, but Pro version is $9.99, is an app for runners and tracks speed, distance, time, pacing and even incline and elevation. A cool feature, according to a lifehacker review, is its ability to track your run history on a google map and produce nifty graphs. The downside is that the app has problems mapping the run correctly but the measurement of distances seems to be good enough.  

Living with Health & Medical Issues

Awesome Note - Cost: $3.99, combines notes with to-dos in one app! Organize your life today and start making every second count.

Cancer Terms Pro - Cost: $1.99, maintains a database of thousands of Treatment, Prevention, Diagnosis, Alternative and Oncological terms available right at your fingertips.

CaringBridge - Cost: Free, provides a streamlined experience for anyone visiting CaringBridge from their web-enabled smartphone. It is formatted to fit smartphone screens and provide CaringBridge users with quick access to their loved one’s health news.

Glucose Buddy - Cost: Free, claims to be the ultimate diabetes helper. Users can manually enter glucose numbers, carbohydrate consumption, insulin dosages, and other activities. Your medical data is stored securely and can be synced with your glucosebuddy.com account. This app was supposedly rated number one  by TuDiabete.com and also was given a thumbs-up sign by media as well as health reviewers.

iBP - Cost: $0.99, is similar to the app HeartWise but with better graphic options. It gives a morning- afternoon summary of BP measurements as well as long-term trends (weeks, months or up to 1 year). Color icons indicate when values are high.

iChemoDiary - Cost: Free, a recent review by About.com summarizes this app succinctly.  "If I had to choose one app to manage chemotherapy treatment, this would be it. Designed by drug maker Merck, iChemoDiary helps you to track chemotherapy appointments, manage medication schedules, and record side effects and symptoms that you may experience.

A great feature of iChemoDiary is that you are able to generate reports over a designated time period to provide to your doctor. The days of keeping a mental record of when fevers started and the exact temperature are over! This is a must-have app for people undergoing chemotherapy and their caretakers."

iHealth Log - Cost: $1.99, designed to help manage the ever changing medications, and then compare and report measured results with the effects of the medicines.

iTriage- Cost: Free, is healthcare in your hand. With iTriage you have access to medical information from over 300 symptoms, 1000 diseases and 350 medical procedures.

Medical Encyclopedia - Cost: Free, the University of Maryland Medical Center has assembled 50000 pages of in-depth information including diseases, symptoms, injuries, surgeries, nutrition and tests.

myCheckUp - Cost: $1.99, tracks your heart rate, weight, and other data  including a daily journal which can be shared with your healthcare professional at your next checkup. Nifty!

Pocket Therapist - Cost: $0.99, sometimes you just need someone to listen to your issues and problems who can help cheer you up and give you healthy advice. Who knew your iPhone could become your own personal therapist for under a buck!

SleepTracker- Cost: Free, tracks your sleep patterns, and identifies patterns of behavior that result in better or more restless sleep, from drinking warm milk to uncomfortable temperatures.

Symptom Checker.MD - Cost: Free, differs from all other symptom checker apps because it gives you trusted medical search results PLUS matches these results to local doctors and specialists that can treat your family's symptoms or conditions with just One-Click.

Drugs & Meds

iMeds - Cost: $0.99, is comprehensive, but is U.S.-specific, with info on U.S. FDA-approved drugs only. However, complete PDF of prescribing info requires Internet access.

iPharmacy - Cost: $0.99, claims to be the most complete collection of info on medications, including their official prescribing info as approved by the FDA. Users seem to be happy with the newest version especially such features as search using trade names. Info about the drugs are sometimes country-specific, but this app is very much customized to the American user and may not be available is some countries.

iRxHelper - Cost: $1.99, is created specifically to help you track your prescriptions. By entering your prescription information into the application, the program will show you which prescriptions need to be refilled within a week (an adjustable value).

Meds Family - Cost: $2.99, is a simple way to manage medications for the whole family and allows you to enter and track all medications organized by family members.

Pregnancy & ChildCare

BabyBump - Cost: $4.99, tracks your pregnancy up to the delivery date and gives details of baby’s development, size, and weight on a weekly basis. It also describes the common pregnancy symptoms. The kick counter and the contraction tracker are nice extras. And it is also available in Spanish and French.

FertilityFriend- Cost: Free, offers the Menstrual Calendar which is a simple and easy to use calendar designed to predict your menstrual cycles and possible fertile days.

Pregnancy Alarm - Cost $9.99, is an ovulation calendar that helps you plan or avoid pregnancy. It claims to be the most downloaded ovulation calendar.

The Wheel SP - Cost: $1.99, is the phone app version of the classical obstetric wheel which calculates the approximate due dates.

Total Baby- Cost : $4.99, will help you log and time all aspects of your child’s care through a smart and sleek interface that makes tracking easy and fun.

First Aid and Emergency

American Medical Aid - Cost:$2.99, is the authoritative reference of “WHAT TO DO” when faced with a medical need, emergency or otherwise.

Close Call- Cost: Free, allows you to put in your phone number, a short message, and an image to create custom health alerts.

CPR & Choking - Cost: Free, provides videos that help you know what to do if someone you know is undergoing a medical emergency or cardiac episode.

EMT ICE- Cost: $2.99, wouldn't it be nice to have emergency information available on our phone in case of an accident or incident that leaves us unable to communicate serious medial needs or issues. The ICE iPhone application provides emergency personnel or EMT's vital information that might save your life.

Pocket First Aid & CPR Guide - Cost: $3.99, can be your electronic health record on the go. Info such as medical conditions, blood types, medications, allergies, doctors’ contacts can be stored. However, since these info are usually password-protected, these can’t be accessed and are therefore useless when the phone owner is unconscious. Links to first aid treatment such as CPR are available.

The reviewers, however, were disappointed about the first version’s lack of good quality images that could have easily illustrated CPR graphically, something which is very useful during emergency situations. Version 3.0 seemed to have improved this shortcoming with better illustrations and video plus child and infant CPR info. A big plus is the backing of the American Heart Association (AHA), thus easy access to the latest AHA news and guidelines.

ResQr- Cost: $3.99, real-time, step-by-step emergency first aid instructions that empower you to be the rescuer in any situation.

Medical

Check a Box. Save a Life - Cost: Free, features the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist to ensure patient safety care. Also includes some medical procedures including central lines. A must have for the medical student.

Distractor Avoidance - Cost $24.99, can improve test scores by teaching the user to avoid DISTRACTORS which are the most commonly chosen answers and unfortunately are usually the wrong answers.  Probably worth it if you pass your boards!

Doctot Geriatric - Cost: $5.99, evaluates and tracks geriatric patients by utilizing the Abbreviated Mental Test Score (MTS), Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS). Barthel ADL Rating Scale (Barthel),Elderly Mobility Scale (EMS) and the BERG Scale (BERG).

Clinical Trials - Cost: Free, provides easy access to search the National Library of Medicine (NLM) database of available clinical trials worldwide.

Epocrates - Cost: The annual subscription rates range from 0 to $199 a year, was supposedly the first app developed for the iPhone and is one of the most popular med apps among health professionals. Epocrates comes in 3 versions with different subscription rates and there is free version called Epocrates Rx.Epocrates contains expected features such as info on diseases, drug info, drug prices, possible drug interactions, lab tests and alternative medicine. Special features are MedMath for dosing calculator, ICD-billing codes, and Pill Identifier. In collaboration with the British Medical Journal it appears that Epocrates is comprehensive and provides up-to-date reliable medical information. [7]

Eponyms- Cost: Free, brings a short description of more than 1'700 common and obscure medical eponyms (e.g., Rovsing's sign, Virchow's node) to your iPhone or iPod touch. A perfect tool to quickly look up the meaning of any eponym.

e-Val MD- Cost: $4.99, a recent review by the iPhone App Review states "It’s almost difficult to fathom how this nifty application works without first experiencing it yourself. It’s simple touch-screen interface provides the portal to a world of important information that has never before been so readily accessible at the tip of one’s finger. e-Val MD allows you to create, access, manage, and export unlimited numbers of patient records using its fully-functional history and physical examination modules".

Instant ECG - Cost: $0.99, is an electrocardiogram rhythms interpretation guide. It features almost 100 high resolution ECG examples, as well as 30 high-definition full screen movies (without audio) of the most common arrhythmias; reference Netter images of the heart, its blood supply, MI correlation to the ECG, and myocardial action potential.

iChart - Cost: $139.99, specifically developed as a digital medical assistant to manage patient records.  iChart automates medical tasks and allows quick access to medical information, anytime, anywhere. The iChart intuitive medical record suite is comprised of several integrated modules, including: iPrescribing, iBilling, iLab reports and iNotes.

iRadiology - Cost: Free, is designed to teach radiology and has more than 500 radiology cases to help medical imaging reading skills. Images include plain films, CT scans, and MRIs. The cases are derived from Dr. Gillian Lieberman, who is the currently Director of Harvard Medical Student training and Associate Director of the Residency Program at Beth Israel Medical Center.

MedCalc - Cost: Free, is a free medical calculator, that gives you easy access to a wide array of medical formulas, scores and classifications.

MedCodes- Cost: $99.99, is the complete medical database of the ICD-9, CPT, and HCPCS codes from the AMA for all medical specialties.

MedicalRadio - Cost: Free, delivers world class medical content directly from ReachMD, the leader in medical education and information for medical professionals.

medpage TODAY Mobile - Cost: Free, is the phone app from the popular MedPage Today site. With the theme “Putting Breaking Medical News Into Practice”, the app makes medical news and articles accessible for the doctor on the road. It is even possible to earn your CME credits.

Medscape Mobile - Cost: Free, the latest version of Medscape apps seems to be at par or may even surpass Epocrates. Most notably, the new Diseases and Conditions and the Clinical Procedures sections seem to be a big hit.

NeuroMind- Cost: Free, offers neurosurgical differential diagnosis (text & mindmap), clinical scores, and the WHO Safe Surgery checklist.

Pedi meds - Cost: $2.99, is a handy app featuring pediatric doses at your fingertips.

STAT Framingham Heart Age - Cost: Free, the well-known Framingham scale is the ultimate tool for doctors to calculate cardiovascular risks and helps them do the job quicker. A not-so-ideal feature are the ads that come with the app.  

For more health apps check out The 63 Best Health & Fitness Apps and for more medical apps check out 100 awesome iphone apps and Software Advice. [8]...[10]

The Bottom Line

Apps are where digital technology and healthy lifestyle meet. Smart phone makers and users will agree that the merger is almost made in heaven!

But don't forget to write reviews. Only from your feedback can developers improve and come up with better and more innovative versions. Digital mobile health is here to stay!

Published June 06, 2010, updated June 12, 2012

References:

1. Fortt Jon, Live: iPhone OS 4.0 preview at Apple headquarters, CNN Money, April 7 2010
2. Gregory M, The rise of the app entrepreneur, BBC, 21 March 2010
3. Oehler RL, Infectious Diseases Resources for the iPhone, Clin Infect Dis. 2010 Mar 16 [Epub ahead of print]
4. Gamble KH, Wireless Tech Trends 2010, Healthcare Informatics, 2010 Feb;27(2):24, 26-7
5. Top 20 Free iPhone Medical Apps for Health care Professionals, iMedicalApps, Dec 24, 2010
6. Ryan E, Today's Top 10 Paid iPhone Medical Apps, Mobile Health News 23 Feb 2010
7. Husain I, Epocrates Essentials App Review for the iPhone - Does the legendary medical app live up to the hype? iMedicalApps, Feb 9 2010
8. Lebowitz S, The 63 Best Health & Fitness Apps, Greatist 2012
9. 100 Awesome iPhone Apps for Med Students and Doctors, Online NursingPrograms, October 28 2009
10. The Best Medical iPhone Apps for Doctors and Med Students, Software Advice, October 07, 2009