Smartphones and tablets could one day become as essential to medicine as stethoscopes and thermometers.
With that future in mind, 30 UC Irvine medical students joined forces with 100 computer science students for the university's first Med App Jam. Eighteen teams competed to develop apps for the iPhone and iPad. The winners were announced last week, with the top award going to Life Buoy, which allows users in a natural disaster to find relief centers or request prescription refills.
Dr. Ralph Clayman, dean of the medical school, said as medicine becomes more mobile, patients will use their devices to communicate with their doctors beyond what was once limited to the exam room.
"They're going to carry their doctor around with them all the time," Clayman said.
Medical student Jonathan Lin worked on an app called Spot Doc, which allows patients to send a photo of a suspicious mole to a dermatologist for further review.
"We wanted it more as a link between them ? getting the patient to see the doctor rather than be the doctor," Lin said.
Another patient-centric app allows parents to easily track their baby's height, weight and head circumference, all in pink or blue.
For doctors, apps ranged from a tool for reporting near medical mistakes to hospital administrators to decoding shorthand notes and abbreviations into understandable sentences in a chart.
The students, who logged hours and hours of their own extracurricular time, will have the option of putting their apps on iTunes, although some would need to do more work.
Medical student Brenton Alexander plans to test the success of his project Saturday when he volunteers at a clinic in Valle Redondo, Mexico.
About a year ago, the Flying Samaritans group stopped transporting 450 medical files across the border and attempted a shift to electronic medical records. There are existing apps that can easily create records, but none that could work in the area's technological isolation. Without electricity, Wi-Fi or 3G cellphone access, the volunteers improvised with a spreadsheet transmitted by Bluetooth.
But the makeshift system frequently crashed, and the spreadsheet was not user-friendly or intuitive.
"It's been mayhem," Alexander said. "It hasn't worked out at all."
The new app, called Global EMR, uses a standard medical form with pull-down options and will repopulate a patient's information at every visit. It also is bilingual.
"Other people who are normally dealing with all this hassle will be able to spend time with patients," Alexander said. "We took all the problems we ever had with this and fixed them all here."
The team of six, including four computer science students, spent about 80 hours developing the app, which was awarded second place.
Medical student Kambria Nguyen worked on the third-place winner, HappierU. The app helps mental health patients rate their daily moods, along with an explanation if desired, to share with their doctors. The app also includes a reminder to take medication and provides resources, including suicide prevention.
"It's an easy way for patients to take care of themselves," Nguyen said. "Everyone has their phone and it's really quick and easy to track their mood."
Contact the writer: Twitter: @cperkes cperkes@ocregister.com 714-796-3686
Source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/medical-379107-app-students.html
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