I’ve been a fan of Informed for many years now. I’ve never been caught at work without one of their products (BLS pocket guide, ALS pocket guide, Critical Care pocket guide) or another, first in the printed/bound version, and more recently, the electronic version.
I had it on my series of Palm Pilots, and now it’s on my iPhone.
Granted, I mostly used it for the Spanish translations & occasionally a lab value, but it was worth my pocket space.
I have other electronic sources that I use almost every day (Epocrates, for example), but still have the Informed data on hand.
Maybe because it’s a local product, made by people I’ve actually met.
Anyway, I must confess that I was less than impressed with their first attempt for the iPhone.
Navigating and search was a bitch. I found myself scrolling through each and every page, looking for that one particular topic. When you’re bouncing down the streets backwards, sweating, with gloves on, trying to find how to say “Slow your breathig down’ in Spanish, you lose your positive feelings towards said product rather quickly.
But that’s been fixed with version 1.2
With just two ‘clicks’ (OK, finger taps), I am at the translation page.
The topics are easily laid out, easy to find, and unfold nicely.
The lab values section is helpful, although I would like to see what low & high values actually mean in a patient.
Like Amylase: increased means pancreatitis, gallstones, trauma, etc.
I have an app called Pocket Lab Values that lists what the lab test is looking for (Amylase is an enzyme secreted by the pancreas and saliva glands in the mouth that breaks down starch into sugar), and the normal values (60-160 U/L), but says nothing about what increased & decreased values actually mean.
Like Amylase: increased means pancreatitis, gallstones, trauma, etc.
What I did a couple of years ago was to put together my own spreadsheet that listed the most common lab values and what they represented, and on those long out-of-town transports, I was able to look up any abnormal lab values, see what they meant, and how they correlated with my patient.
I wanna see that in an app.
Maybe I should do my own…
But anyway, digression over.
The new version of the Critical Care Pocket Guide from Informed is worth every penny of the $9.99 cost. It’s easy to use, easy to navigate, and just may become your Cliff Claven in your own ambulance.
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