iMedic

Jazz up your clipboard folder

Busy house officers and clinical medical students can find some useful tools to organise themselves on the wards at Medfools. The free downloads include pdfs of patient tracker templates, history and examination sheets, microbiology charts, and paediatric revison cards.

Feeding frenzy

The University of Manitoba’s Health Sciences Library has an excellent listing of RSS feeds of a medical persuasion, including details of a rather useful tool for users of PubMed:

“this is a nifty tool which allows you to create a PubMed search and run it in HubMed. The results from HubMed can then be sent to your RSS aggregator as an RSS feed. You can use free text, boolean and/or MeSH headings in your search of HubMed, just as you would with PubMed.”

You can then go through the resulting abstracts in your aggregator, with more cool features available at the site. Check it out here: Hubmed

Everybody's aggregating

Keeping up to date with medical news can be difficult, and judging by the pile of unread BMJs on my desk, it’s something I’m not very good at. This is where news aggregators come in. By subscribing to a website’s RSS feed, these handy pieces of software allow news and updates to be delivered, as they happen, from the website to your desktop.
If you’re new to them, get some background here, a tutorial here, and if you’re still not convinced maybe this article will sell it to you. Popular programs include FeedDemon, NewzCrawler, and Awasu for Windows, and NetNewsWire and NewsFire on Macs. Bloglines is a popular choice amongst people wishing to use a web-based reader.

Most news sites and blogs will have a site subscription available in some form. Once you've downloaded your news reader, here are some medical feeds to get you started. (links direct you to the site’s RSS page rather than the actual feed):

• BBC offers feeds for all of its news channels including Health
• National Electronic Library for Health
• British Medical Journal syndicates its current headlines
• New England Journal of Medicine (Table of Contents via News is Free)
• World Health Organisation

And of course, you can subscribe to this site up there on the right.

Presenting iMedic

Welcome to iMedic, a place where I'll be collecting the latest articles and news stories relating to the world of technology in medicine. This is also where I'll be attempting to highlight the websites, gadgets, software, and hacks that may make a busy health professional's life easier. So, if you're interested in reading about anything from talking drug labels to the best PDA drug formularies, you're in the right place.

Fellow iMedics wishing to share their tips and tricks, or wanting to make any comments or suggestions are most welcome to drop me a line (follow the link on the top right).

Thanks for stopping by. Check back for more posts later.....