I like trying out free software. When I was in school, I did it for fun, but now that I’m a doctor, using free software has become pretty much a necessity. Here are some that I use or have seen used in our hospital.

Palm Programs

I have only three free applications in my Palm Zire 71:

• Epocrates Rx. Free drug and formulary reference tool packed with other goodies, like medical calculators and MobileCME.
• Johns Hopkins ABX Guide. Free antibiotic and infectious disease reference.
• MedCalc. An app that contains most of the useful medical formulas. Note to the medical students though: you must memorize how to calculate the anion gap, body mass index and creatinine clearance (Cockroft ang Gault formula). You should be able to do it without MedCalc. (Me, I use the Steriod equivalence calc.)

I used to have patient tracking software in my Palm, but I found the process of inputing data tedious. Now, I use the HipsterPDA to keep track of my patients. (More on this on a later post.)

DICOM Viewers

The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard, developed by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA), is the format of choice when distributing medical images such as coronary angiograms and MRIs. Think of it as the jpeg and animated gif of the medical world. For the Windows people, there are many free DICOM viewers available for download. Our Section of Cardiology uses Comview’s Viewstar PC, but I can’t seem to find a working download link. Both eTeleCardiology.com and the Comview site are down so I’m not sure about the fate of this piece of software. I’ve seen UniPACS DICOM viewer at work and it seems to do its job pretty well. For Mac zealots, there is OsiriX. I’ve actually have had the pleasure of seeing OsiriX run on an iBook, and I can tell you that it’s impressive. More about DICOM and free DICOM viewers here.

Others

Another medical imaging program with promise is Neurolens. It runs on Macs only, and you have to contact the developers to get a copy. The program displays neuro-images and can even generate 3 dimensional models of the human brain using MRI and CT scan images. I’m not sure if it uses the DICOM format too.

Our Department of Surgery keeps track of their patients using a system called ISIS (I forgot what it stands for). I was able to talk to one of their consultants and he says the system utilizes Debian (operating system), PHP and SQL.

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