The Top 4 Medical Apps for Pediatricians

Pediatrics, a wonderful field of Medicine that is often argued as one of the most rewarding paths to take for any physician.  What could be more wonderful than spending a whole day with adorable babies, curious children, and jovial toddlers and experiencing their wonderful antics?  Unfortunately, as most physicians will attest to, this is a fantasy world where children are never as cute or wonderful as a parent could imagine.  Screaming patients that are terrified of stethoscopes make any auscultation a miserable experience and there is always the ever-present possibility of a child projectile vomiting across your examining room during a routine visit to name only a few of the complications that a physician can navigate through.  

My first experience in a Pediatric rotation is still scarred in my hippocampus where not only were our patients terrified of doctors, but to make matters worse, shortly after we began our examination, our 5 year old patient began vomiting.  His previously healthy 3 year old brother followed his lead and began doing the same just because he saw his brother doing it.  Needless to say, the allure of dealing with children quickly faded and Pediatrics was crossed off my list of desired specialties.  My experience was quite a memorable event but some of my other colleagues were more fortunate.  Regardless of if you love or hate the field, Pediatrics is hard and any advantage to make the workload easier is something to grab when given an opportunity.  Here are the top 4 Pediatric Apps out there that that can make lives for pediatricians a little easier.  

Number 1:  PaediaTricks- Child Health App

This medical app is a must-have application in any arsenal for pediatricians in the field.  Rated as a 4.7/5 stars and available on both the Android and iOS platforms, this app provides a comprehensive overview of some of the most common presentations that a pediatrician will encounter during rounds.  After downloading the app, the user with have access to a list of standard protocols for management of emergency pediatric conditions, flowcharts to make the material easy to digest, and crucial differentials that must be considered based on common and often ambiguous presentations.  

This app also has the advantage of being useful for parents as well.  On the parenting mode of this app, parents will receive comprehensive overviews of home management strategies for various ailments, a useful differential list to consider with common medical conditions, a schedule of necessary vaccinations that all children are recommended to have, and finally, a list of “red flag” symptoms that should trigger a “knee-jerk” reflex in parents to take their children to the local ER department.  

READ US Pediatricians: Antibiotics are Over-prescribed to Children

Number 2:  Pediatric Calculator

It doesn’t matter if you are a first year medical student or a seasoned pediatric fellow, figuring out medication dosing in children is a nightmare for any level.  This application is a solution for this miserable task.  With this app, a pediatrician will be able to enter parameters like weight, age, sex, and symptoms and this calculator will tabulate the most useful medications as well as the standard doses for those specific parameters.  There is an option to enter additional medications that a patient is taking in order to avoid any cross-sensitivity; a very useful feature considering the number of medications that should be avoided in our young population.  Using this app, acceptable ranges are generated so the physician will instantly know the highest level of medication that can be safely be prescribed to patients.  

This app scored a solid 4.6/5 stars and is available on the Android and the iOS platform.  This is a very useful app to download and I encourage all pediatricians to review it for themselves.  It is enough of a difficult task to determine medications based on weight and age of a patient and then factor in any renal impairment or fluid restrictions and you are left with a very difficult task of determining the appropriate course of action.  This app will give users some confidence that they are managing the patient correctly and accounting for parameters that can be often missed if a physician is not aware of the patient’s medical chart intimately.  

2 More Apps for Pediatricians: Pediatric Resuscitation and  Pediatric Pedia

Number 3:  Pediatric Resuscitation

This application has a lot of practical applications around the wards of a Pediatric department.  When a child becomes unresponsive, it is critical to ensure that ventilation is returned immediately in order to preserve nerves so the patient has the best chance for a high quality of life after such a traumatic incident.  This app provides a comprehensive algorithm for the most current AHA guidelines for Pediatric resuscitation so a resuscitation effort is done correctly.  As an added bonus, this app also will give recommendations for appropriate levels of drugs necessary for resuscitation such as epinephrine and amiodarone.  Because time is the most critical factor in this cascade, physicians using this app will be able to save valuable time in deciding the appropriate actions to take and be able to have a clear understanding of what to prepare before the leads to the defibrillator are even attached to the patient.  

This app is scored as a 4.6 out of 5 stars and would have a good tool to have for any physician in the field.  During certification for PALS, I remember that dosing for medications was often generalized because it took too long to calculate based on the weight of the child.  Pulling out the calculator to figure out the right level of medication is not an essential task to bring a child back to life and is often an impossible luxury due to wards not having the adequate manpower for a 5-personal revival effort.  This application will cut this time into seconds as well as remind the response team the appropriate algorithms and procedures based on availability of a crash cart.  

Number 4:  Pediatric Pedia

This last application is also another valuable item to download.  After downloading, the user will have a comprehensive breakdown of appropriate heart rates, blood pressures, and developmental milestones for patients based on their age, alleviating some of the common mistakes made in the ward.  If you aren’t sure if a Heart Rate of 125 in a 3-year old is tachycardic or normal, then this app is for you.  This application also has tabs for drug calculations and common presentations like in some of the other apps listed so you can save some space on those tablets by just going for this all-encompassing app.  Additionally, the user will be able to determine the appropriate sizes of incubation tubes or other medical equipment that is dependent on the age of the patients quite easily.  Last but not least, this app also has a comprehensive breakdown of growth and height curves as well as jaundice curves.  Doctors will be able to input levels of bilirubin and generate a curve to determine the trend and then receive recommendations for the dose of phototherapy or frequencies of exchange transfusions to address their patient’s condition.  

READ How To Choose Your Baby's Pediatrician

This app is a good installation based on the fact that it covers a wide array of common points of confusion for medical students, residents, and physicians.  It can be tricky when dealing with young patients because there isn’t the convenient HR >100 is always tachycardia that we can use in the adult populations.   This same hindrance is also present when considering the blood pressures.  Tracing bilirubin levels is also a nice feature to make sure that you are providing enough phototherapy to alleviate any hyperbilirubinemia.  Definitely consider this one if you are a Pediatrician out here.