Five Free And Simple Google Tools For Medical Practitioners

Google is the biggest influence on the web over the past 20 years of the internet. Their “Do No Evil” ‘philosophy’ has given us a whole stable of free and easy to use tools which can make any work easier and better. All of us use the Google Search Engine Homepage everyday! There is lots more a doctor can do with Google tools. Let’s take a look at Five Free And Simple Google Tools For Medical Practitioners.

1) Gmail

This is the most useful service ever by Google, barring Google Search. And you can have more of it! You can use Gmail to create 2 (or more) free accounts. So you can create one personal and another public email address for your medical practice. Eg: one can be dr.abc@gmail.com and another neuromumbai911@gmail.com. By going to settings, you can then set to import your other email account into your primary gmail account. You can enable ‘multiple inboxes’ via Labs subtab, allowing you to receive neatly segmented mails. Check this video.

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You can reply by your choice of account, enabling you to keep your personal and professional emails separated by different accounts, yet accessible and answerable from one single account.

Here’s a detailed screenshot enhanced post about this feature on Make Tech easier.

2) Google Alerts

If there are certain terms you want to follow on Google and receive any new mentions directly to your email inbox, create a Google Alert. Fill in the term you need to follow, like ‘Cardiology India news’ or ‘neelesh bhandari’ and set the frequency/type of alerts required. Stay updated via email.

3) Google Maps

Maps and Places allow you to mark your professional locations and timings on a map. Link this marked map within all your emails. Henceforth all patients you email will see how to reach you easily via a map, with additional info about consultation hours that you might want to share.

4) Google Scholar

You don’t need to always go to Pubmed for all your medical searches. Head to Google Scholar and do any advanced search (author, type, publication year and lots more filters). You will get More Results. You will search more medical databases. Try it.

5) Youtube Channel

Online videos are the most important medical info resource. But you don’t need to create videos to run a medical educational channel for your patients. Just create a channel by free login and start marking as favorite the best medical education videos you think might help your patients. Set channel settings to demonstrate your video favorites. Thus, you have a full blown video channel. Zero cost!

We are planning another post on 5 Advanced And Free Google tools For Medical Practitioners. If you want to read that soon, Share This.

If you need help with any of the above 5 tools, comment below.

(cross-posted on Technology For Doctors )

5 Useful and Free Android Medical Apps

Use of Smartphones in healthcare is the latest intersection of Technology and Medicine. These inexpensive handheld computing devices allow users to download third party applications (apps) which can perform specialized tasks. Most Smartphones run on either the Apple iPhone’s iOS or the Android OS and there are literally tens of thousands of medical apps available for either of these operating systems.

Clinical care is information intensive and some of the most commonly used mobile applications by physicians are for medical reference. By providing the latest evidence based medicine updates at the point-of-care, Smartphones are proving to be a very important tool for improving quality of healthcare.Here's a list of Top 5 Free Medical Reference Apps For Android Smartphones which physicians can use everyday for clinical purposes.

1) Medscape : Medscape is a popular web resource for physicians and other health professionals. This is a must have application which provides offline access to clinical reference tools like Drug Reference, Disease & Condition Reference and Treatment Guide, Procedures Reference, Tables & Protocols Reference and Drug Interaction Checker.

2) Skyscape Medical Resources : Founded by a group of Indian innovators, Skyscape is a worldwide leading service for providing trusted medical information via mobile devices. The Skyscape portal provides a number of free as well as paid medical apps for almost all specialties.

3) Epocrates : Epocrates is a publisher of mobile device software applications, designed to provide information about drugs to doctors and other health care professionals. The Epocrates application is the most popular of its kind providing a huge amount of information about pharmaceuticals. Regular use of this app can definitely help reduce errors in drug prescriptions.

4) PubMed Mobile : An uber useful app by the National Library of Medicine, PubMed Mobile allows the user to search its database with over 21 million citations for articles and journals, save articles and searches, view abstracts, and export selected abstracts and citations for future use. NLM also provides a number of other mobile optimized tools and apps. Check the NLM Mobile Gallery here.

5) WebMD : WebMD is the leading health information portal of the United States. It was founded in 1996 by Jim Clark and Pavan Nigam as Healthscape, later Healtheon, and then acquired WebMD in 1999 to form Healtheon/WebMD. The free app provides access to information regarding health and health care, including a symptom checklist, pharmacy information and drugs information.

This article has been cross-posted on Technology For Doctors blog.

Related article

• 20 Free iPhone Medical Apps (medpromgmt.wordpress.com)

How WWW Has Changed Healthcare Over 20 Years

Nothing has overwhelmed the world as quickly as the WWW. Twenty years ago (on 6th august, 1991) the World Wide Web was thrown open for the public ( Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee). Since then, billions of people have joined each other online and converted this into a social platform like no other.

The web has also changed the way healthcare is practiced and delivered. Check this video by Life Healthcare Agency



Also See:

• NHS Direct plans to use Facebook to provide medical advice . 
• How the internet is changing healthcare.
• Sixty-one percent of all U.S. adults have used the Internet to look for health or medical information
  
• The Internet's impact on healthcare