3 new medical apps

These new medical apps help clinicians and patients:

Pediatric Asthma Risk Score

The Pediatric Asthma Risk Score (PARS) medical app was created out of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. PARS is a continuous scoring system for predicting asthma risk in young children.

The app asks you to answer six questions related to the patient’s past medical history and demographics. Based on these answers, it assigns a PARS score. Based on the PARS score, you are given the probability of the patient developing asthma by the age of 7.

The score was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in December 2018, and was shown to be better than the Asthma Predictive Index (API) in children with mild to moderate asthma.

One of the main reasons I am featuring this medical app is because it’s a great example of how researchers can take published research and transform it into an easy-to-use app that can be accessed by any clinician. Traditionally, you would have to read the actual published article to access the guidelines and scoring criteria. By making this into an app, clinicians will be more inclined to download and use the tool.

PneumoRecs VaxAdvisor

Remembering vaccination guidelines and making sure your patient is up to date on key vaccines isn’t always easy—especially when it comes to the pneumococcal vaccines. These guidelines have undergone updates in recent years, making keeping track of when to administer them a bit more confusing.

There are several medical apps dedicated to helping providers remember when patients should receive their pneumococcal vaccines and the types to administer. However, it’s nice to see the CDC finally getting into the fray and releasing their own dedicated app to help clinicians with this, especially since they created the guidelines.

The PneumoRecs VaxAdvisor was created by the CDC in collaboration with the Georgia Tech Research Institute. The app provides easy-to-use, patient-specific pneumococcal vaccination guidance. Simply enter the patient’s age, pneumococcal vaccination history and underlying medical conditions.

The app is particularly useful in the pediatric patient population of less than 2 years of age (PCV13). The app gives specific recommendations on the numbers of doses of PCV13 and the specific intervals the vaccinations should be given. For clinicians in the primary care setting, this is a must-have app when evaluating if a patient is up to date on their vaccinations.

PE & DVT dx tool

I have featured several apps by Joshua Steinberg, M.D., in the past—and this one gets a great update.

The PE & DVT dx tool app incorporates a clinician’s pretest probability via the Wells DVT score to help make decisions on whether or not to order a D-dimer or imaging. The app offers one algorithm for DVT diagnosis and two algorithms for PE diagnosis.

The app makes it easy to go through these algorithms based on what you’re evaluating and gives the option to view the algorithms on one page via a large diagram. The new addition is the evaluation of a pulmonary embolism in a pregnant patient. This is based on a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in October 2018, by Righini M, et al., “Diagnosis of Pulmonary Embolism During pregnancy: A multicenter Prospective Management Outcome Study.”

As usual, Steinberg does a great job of providing all the references, as well as detailed explanations.