About
About
www.MedicalAppScreening.com was founded by Kristian Aclan, DNP-C, MSN, RN. This was part of his doctorate project for the School of Nursing at the University of San Francisco, CA. Mr. Aclan saw that there was a disparity between medical apps that gave high quality medical recommendations and apps that could be potentially harmful if the recommendation was used. With supporting evidence Mr. Aclan had a vision of letting medical practitioners know which apps had the highest quality of information.
With the continuous evolvement of medicine and technology, providers seek the best and most up to date electronic resources to provide best practice recommendations. Medical reference apps can be systematically screened be assessing five categories: authorship, updates, peer review, evidence source, evidence grade with explanation (Butcher et al., 2015; Lewis & Wyatt, 2014; Banzi et al., 2010; Kwag et al., 2016).
www.MedicalAppScreening.com gives medical practitioners a repository of systematically screened apps. This website also allows for medical practitioners to screen their own medical reference apps and share their results here.
What this website brings?
Prescreening medical reference apps for providers is a proven cost-effective way of increasing the use of high quality medical information. It has been recommended that providers prescreen their medical reference apps, but due to time constraints it is understood that this is not possible at the clinic setting. Therefore, having access to a website with current evaluations of medical reference apps would be beneficial to the provider.
Who screened the apps? Can I add to the repository?
Mr. Aclan searched the Apple App Store using the term “Medical References” during the month of January 2018. The search resulted in a 130 apps downloaded in which 50 apps were systematically screened. Only apps that gave a recommendation on treatment and or diagnosis were screened. This was the start, but we hope that other medical practitioners, including yourself, systematically screen their apps and add to this online database.
References:
Banzi, R., Liberati, A., Moschetti, I., Tagliabue, L., Moja, L., (2010) A Review of Online Evidence based Practice Point of Care information Summary Providers. Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 12., iss. 2., e26., p.1
Butcher, R., MacKinnon, M., Gadd, K., & LeBlanc-Duchin, D. (2015). Development and Examination of a Rubric for Evaluating Point-of-Care Medical Applications for Mobile Devices. Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 34(1), 75–87 13p. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2015.986794
Kwag, K. H., Lorenzo, M.G., Banzi, R., Bonovas, S., Moja, L., (2016). Providing Doctors with High Quality Information: An Update Evaluation of Web BAsed Point of Care information Summaries
Lewis, T. L., & Wyatt, J. C. (2014). mHealth and Mobile Medical Apps: A Framework to Assess Risk and Promote Safer Use. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 16(9), e210–e210. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.3133
