Informed Emergency & Critical Care Pocket Guide – Review
App Type: Uncategorized
Our rating: 
By: Informed Publishing
Version #: 1.0
Date Released: 2010-05-21
Developer: Informed Publishing
Price: 9.99
User Rating:
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If you have read my article "Apps in the Line of Duty," you know I work as a paramedic and love to use the many apps available on my iPhone to assist me in providing excellent pre-hospital care. Today I have the pleasure of reviewing an app from Informed, a company whose name is famous in the medical world for providing the best guides and study books. Informed has finally released a digital copy of their Emergency & Critical Care field guide for the iPhone. These guide are great for keeping a paramedics knowledge sharp and providing a quick reference on a variety of topics. The usefulness of the paper guide is already well know, so let’s take a look at the digital version and see if it can live up to it’s analog ancestor.
This particular guide is divided into sections for various subjects such as airway, ACLS algorithms, and pediatrics. The guide allows you to drill down through each subject to find the information you are looking for, much like you would on a browser. The guide has buttons at the bottom of every page to add notes and to bookmark sections for easy access later. The main menu allows access to your bookmarks and also to a search bar to help you find the obscure reference you can’t remember. This feature by itself makes this app much more valuable than its spiral bound brother. Most items you might want to find are easily located through the sections, but occasionally you want to find something unusual and it never fails that you can’t seem to remember where you saw it. Now a quick search can reveal the desired information.
All of this alone would be great by itself, and would emulate the function of the physical book well enough, but Informed went one more step and added a calculator section that provides nine useful calculator tools for various scores and conversions that may now be done often enough to do in your head. I found the APGAR score to be extremely helpful since we rarely have a field delivery and this score is useful for quickly conveying a newborns condition to the hospital. The guide also has common conversions of standard to metric.
Informed has also released an RN guide, and has plans to release more of the physical guides as iPhone apps. With the digital copies it is possible to receive updates and corrections as protocols change. At $9.99 it is significantly less expensive that the print version while increasing in it’s usefulness. It would be nice to see more utilization of the notes so they could be searched and some indication that a page has been annotated. Perhaps a social aspect would be useful to allow notes to be shared with other users. Even without this features I found Informed’s Emergency & Critical Care Guide to exceed the function of the physical version and has found a prominent spot in my digital tool box for work as a Paramedic.
Quick Take
Value:High
Would I Buy Again:Yes
Learning Curve:Easy
Who Is It For:Anyone in Emergency Medicine
What I Like:Search Function, Medical Calculators.
What I Don't Like:Notes seem underdeveloped.
Final Statement:Informed has done a great job of bringing it's guides to the iPhone.
We have listened to our user feedback, and the new interactive app is more accessible than ever:
* Quick navigation to critical information
* Custom bookmarks let you quickly return to your favorite pages
* Expanded search capability
* Add notes to a page
* Calculators
The Informed® Emergency & Critical Care Pocket Guide™ for iPhone & iPod Touch gives you immediate access to critical information in an easy-to-use app with rich content, detailed illustrations, and pioneering features. Best of all, you know you can depend on the Informed Emergency & Critical Care Pocket Guide™ for iPhone & iPod Touch, because it was created by Informed Publishing—the trusted leader in emergency reference information since 1986. Informed’s print and digital guides are carried in the pockets, on mobile devices, and in the emergency vehicles of over one million first responders nationwide.
Powered by Jive Media, this app includes free content updates for the life of the edition.
The Informed Emergency & Critical Care Pocket Guide™ for iPhone & iPod Touch makes it easy for physicians, paramedics and nurses check ACLS drug doses, interpret EKGs, look up patient medications, and much more.
Critical information covers use of airway devices such as the Combitube, LMA, and King LT™ Airway, a complete list of emergency & ACLS drugs, including Natrecor and Ketamine, an extensive prescription drug list, Rapid 12-Lead EKG interpretation page, dermatomes, hemodynamics, lab values, and a complete list of abbreviations.
* Current ACLS Algorithms
* Emergency & ACLS Drugs
* 12-Lead EKG Section & Acute MI
* Basic EKG Rhythms
* Laryngeal Mask Airway / RSI
* “Rave” Drugs
* Basic Chest X-Ray Interpretation
* Fibrinolytic Screen for AMI & Stroke
* Ischemic Stroke Management / Neuro
* Pediatric Resuscitation, Drug Doses, Vitals
* End-Tidal CO2 / Capnography / Ventilator Guidelines
* Trauma & Glasgow Coma Scales
* Common Medical Emergencies
* Burn Charts, the “Rule of 9s”
* Pulse Oximetry, IV Drip Rates
* Quick EMS Spanish Translations
* Lab Values, Metrics, and Notes Pages
Screenshots
Article By Nathan Kline
Nathan has been an avid Apple user and advocate since the days of the Apple ][. He has always sought to find new ways to make use of technology to assist his daily life. As a paramedic in southern California Nathan brings his familiarity with technology to the field, and at whatsoniphone.com he brings his critical thinking to he analysis of apps and news. You has also written app reviews for the mobile app site Smokinapps.com.
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