There are more than 350,000 healthcare apps available, from those used to help patients track their calorie intake to ones for aiding physicians in easily finding peer-reviewed summaries of published medical research. Sifting through them takes a lot of time, something of which doctors like you typically don’t have enough.
We’ve compiled a list of five of the top healthcare apps — starting with our favorite, of course — designed to make life easier for you and your practice. All you have to do is decide on the ones that work best for you!
Epion Check-In
Most patients prefer healthcare providers who offer digital health tools. These tools enable them to complete registration and other tasks on their mobile device — anywhere at any time. This leaves more time for you as a doctor to spend more face-to-face time with them during their appointment.
Our check-in app allows patients to check in before their appointment, review their co-pays, outstanding balances and collection balances and set up a card on file to make payments. In addition to giving you the capability to offer personalized and convenient care, this results in a staff time savings of 15-20 minutes per patient, more accurate patient records, improved cash flow, enhanced practice efficiency and less administrative burden.
The Epion Health platform can be configured to the unique workflow, clinical and billing requirements associated with different specialty practices, including primary care, orthopedics, OB-GYN and pain management. Its on-the-fly feature enables your staff to push out text messages and forms to patients on demand, accommodating walk-ins and unplanned needs.
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Figure 1
Collaborating with your fellow physicians allows you to expand your medical knowledge and better treat patients. The purpose of this app is to let you securely share and discuss real-world medical cases in real-time, page specialists for feedback and even earn continuing medical education credits (CME).
Figure 1 boasts approximately three million registered members sharing more than 100,000 patient cases from 190 countries in 35 specialties. The app automatically blocks faces and removes identifying information to meet HIPAA standards.
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Medscape
There are more than 20,000 prescription drugs available in the U.S. Remembering all of them and their use cases is almost impossible, even for the smartest doctors.
There’s a reason roughly half of all physicians in the United States use this app. In addition to providing news reports on various medical topics, the Medscape app gives you easy access to guidelines, safety and prescription information for about 8,500 drugs, along with a tool to visually identify pills. It includes formulary information, pharmacy directories and more than 600 dosing calculators.
Another important feature of this app is that it allows you to easily check for possible adverse drug interactions, which can not only lead to an increase or decrease in the prescriptions’ potency but also cause potentially dangerous side effects. You can even use the app’s new audio player to listen to podcasts about trending medical topics.
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Prevention TaskForce
Designed and developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), this app helps primary care clinicians identify the screening, counseling and preventive medication services that are appropriate for their patients. The app’s data is based on the current recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) and can be searched by specific patient characteristics, including as age, sex/gender and selected behavioral risk factors.
As the USPSTF notes, the Prevention TaskForce app is not meant to replace clinical judgment and individualized patient care.
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VisualDx
This app gives you access to more than 40,000 curated medical images in multiple areas, including dermatologic, infectious and drug-induced diseases. Designed to help you improve diagnostic accuracy and reduce implicit bias by accessing data-driven differentials, it covers approximately 2,800 rare and common conditions.
The VisualDx app also offers curated and peer-reviewed clinical information, handbook-length summaries of more than 3,200 diagnoses across all medicine and a problem-oriented clinical search function. Plus, its SMART® on FHIR® integration enables you to extract the sex, age, medication and problem lists from your patient’s record.
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Check out our HITRUST-certified and HIPAA-compliant patient engagement platform to learn how you can more easily deliver patient care that’s personal and intuitive. And, schedule a meeting with one of our talented team members to see how Epion Health can reduce your administrative burden.
