Reviewed By Physicians: Top Ten Anaesthesia Apps

Anaesthesia is the science of putting the body and mind to sleep — deep enough to make the perception of pain impossible, yet shallow enough to come out of it alive and fully functional. What would the world be without anaesthesia? How would the miracles of modern day medicine take place? Who would dare perform surgery on a waking, feeling, person? Vital to the execution and success of surgery, the practice of this dangerous science requires extreme precision and a readiness to make informed decisions.

Coming up are a set of tools that can add confidence to decision making in the OR and the ICU by keeping clinical calculators and up to date information at your fingertips. All the apps are free and light on your phone's storage.

Anaesthesia

Anaesthesia, the Journal of the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland (AAGBI), has an app by the same name, developed by its publisher Wiley. The app shows the association's twitter feed and society news, along with ready access to articles. The app is free and open access articles are available on it. Of course a genuine subscription is required to read the rest of the articles.

Online Anaesthesia

A companion to the website onlineanaesthesia.com, the Online Anaesthesia app lets doctors maintain a logbook of cases on the go. Different details can be stored under separate heads — namely operation, obstetric, ITU and pain. Records can be added offline as well. The central database is updated the next time your device comes online. The app is free of cost initially, requiring a $3 subscription after the first month or the first 50 cases. Local backups of data can also be kept.

Narkosist

Developed by Dr. Anmar Qashish, Narkosist gives you standard doses of anaesthetic agents at your fingertips along with calculations of dose for specific age and weight. For inhalational agents it calculates the MAC for a given age.  The agents are grouped according to their use, route, and mechanism of action.

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Piramal Anaesthesia Assistant

The good thing about this app is that it calculates cost per hour along with dose, helping the anaesthetist keep in mind financial implications for the patient. A list of relevant events occurring nearby is available on the events calendar list. The Doctor's Corner is stocked with recent developments in the field, journal papers and articles. This is a well-rounded app for anaesthetists. It can be used to 'connect' with other users or 'get in touch' with the manager in their respective country. It comes free of cost on android devices.

Aneslist

The app provides a checklist for transfer of care in the OR. The list is comprehensive and can help bring down human errors while transfer of care. The app also keeps a logbook, which is automatically updated the moment a checklist is completed. It would be better still if the checklist was modifiable, but even so the app can be a gem in the OR. It’s available free on android devices.

Five More Anaesthesia Apps To Check Out 

InfusiCalc

InfusiCalc is a drug dose calculator that determines doses, infusion rates, and drip rates and so on for several common injectable agents. Notes about important side effects and dangers are given with each drug.  The app can be of real use in making quick but correct decisions. The app is available free of cost on the AppStore and on Google Play.

General Paediatric Anaesthesia

This app, available free on Google Play, is another smart and handy calculator. Reviews by anaesthetists using it on the field are pretty good. The app calculates tidal volume, ETT length and diameter, cardio version strength and several other such parameters in addition to drug doses. Decision making in the OT has never been this simple.

iCU Notes

The app provides easy to access and organized information on a wide range of topics that can spring up at any time in the Intensive Care Unit. The details are given in bullet points making it easy to read and assimilate. The list of topics is pretty comprehensive and helpful. The interface however is amateurish and lacks visual content. If you look past the packaging though it’s a helpful app to have on your smartphone.

ACTc Lite

To begin with ACTc stands for "Anaesthesia clinical tutor and calculator". This app, developed by Anthony Young, is the total package. It can be used for dose calculation, fluid tracking, blood transfusion calculations, patient tailored case setups and so forth. Case specific literature reviews, clinical networking and integrated research features with the NCBI are additional perks. The app's interface is drab and easy to overlook, but apart from that it really doesn't have much against it.

Anaesthesia Impact

The app is an interactive tool for inhalational anaesthetics tracking. The interface is visual and simple. It allows adjustment of the fresh gas flow in the flow meter, and changes in the inhalant agent concentration. The app displays the cost per hour and the CO2 emissions, comparing it with the distance a car travels to make the same emissions. The cost per bottle, the car's efficiency and CO2 equivalence can be changed from the settings. Thus the app helps to estimate the cost to the patient, and the cost to the environment, two things that the anaesthetist must keep in mind about the impact of his/her decisions.

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There are a host of other apps that could be very useful but are not included because they have paid subscriptions. There are plenty of apps from anaesthesiology journals and textbooks including the oxford handbooks that should definitely be used by a resident/specialist. Having said that, there is also a dearth of apps that could really inform clinical decision making when things get complicated. Easily accessible and comprehensive collections of different studies to support evidence-based medicine also need to be compiled and made available as free apps. Apps by professional bodies and institutes are scarcer compared to other specialties. However, considering the extensive and rapid calculations an anesthetist has to do in the OR, the diligent screening required pre-op, the multitude of devices used in the ICU – there is considerable scope to develop applications far surpassing those available now in their utility and innovation.