Best Apps for Nurses -As a practicing Nurse who has not got much experience or a newly graduated nurse, you often have to refer to data and you certainly do not want to go asking around or looking for your books. There are apps developed for nurses or medical practitioners to be a database for information that can serve as reference.
If you are reading this, you are probably a nurse who is looking to improve their nursing skills. First, understand that there is nothing wrong with having apps to help your knowledge, job, and skills. It takes years of experience to have a lot of information by heart, so having apps that offer real-time solutions is ideal.
There are apps developed with the help of professional medical practitioners and can help you with easy decision making and vital information. This article is written to help you identify these useful apps and download the ones that you may need.
Some of the apps mentioned are specialized apps and deal with only one section of health, pediatrics as an example. One such app includes weight-based medication dosages in its database as well as medical management of allergies, hypoglycemia and other conditions.
The apps mentioned here are trusted and reviewed by professionals so you have no problems using them. However, you can check the content of the apps to see if you can trust it. These apps are just some of the recommended apps for nurses, as there are more than thirty apps built to help medical practitioners with their job.
Best Apps for Nurses
- Pedi STAT
- MDCalc
- Epocrates
- Pedi Quikcalc
- Gahart’s IV Medications Handbook
- Headspace
- LactMed
- Perfect OB Wheel
1. Pedi STAT
This app is one of the most used premium medical apps on Google Play Store. Pedi STAT focuses on pediatrics and costs about five to six dollars. It currently has more than ten thousand downloads and is considered one of the best reference apps for medical practitioners in pediatrics.
There are many quality features and users can calculate the medication dosage of patients using their age, broselow, height and weight. This is very helpful as a nurse as you only have to input your patient’s correct weight to get an accurate dosage calculation.
The app also has a broselow guide and provides references for many categories such as burns, airway intervention, cardiac resuscitation, fever and many others. The anti-microbial doses recommended by Pedi STAT are usually according to manufacturer recommendations.
Pedi STAT also helps with fluid resuscitation and can calculate estimated burn area and recommend solutions, providing references to its answers. The app is no doubt one of the best apps for nurses.
The app is available for use on both android and iOS devices.
2. MDCalc
This app was developed by certified medial practitioners to solve problems that nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare specialists face every time. There are more than 500 clinical decision tools and content on the app and everything is based on evidence and references.
The biggest advantages of this app are that it is completely free and can work offline. Some type of clinical decision tools and content offered by MDCalc are equations, risk scores, dosage calculators, algorithms and many others.
MDCalc features quick access lists and users can customize their page to enable easier access to favorite decision tools.
The app is available for use on both android and iOS devices, racking up as much as 500k downloads on Google Play Store alone.
3. Epocrates
Epocrates is sometimes considered the best clinical support app a medical practitioner can have. Unfortunately, the app is not available in some African countries. The app has more than one million downloads on Google Play Store and is rated 4.4 out of 5 by more than 25,000 people.
Medical students can subscribe to a full version of the app called Epocrates plus that contains so much information. According to statistics, more than 40% of American physicians and medical students use Epocrates. The app is free for medical students but costs 160 USD for a one-year subscription.
The app provides evidence and reference-based resources on drug and diseases and will be just the right app for a nurse. Epocrates is available for use on both android and iOS devices the interface is really nice.
Epocrates also features medical news and you can use calculators easily too. It is arguably the best and complete medical reference app, featuring formularies, drugs, herbs and supplements, guidelines, pill ID, diseases, labs, references, calculators and a lot more.
A unique feature of this app is that you can identify an unknown pill using shape, color and imprint. Epocrates is not only quite resourceful for nurses, it can also serve other medical students satisfactorily.
4. Pedi Quikcalc
Pedi Quikcalc is a reference and calculator app that is used by pediatric healthcare practitioners. Nurses who work in pediatrics may need to refer to growth charts, carry out bilirubin evaluation, check body mass index among other things.
This app has been recognized by many organizations to be one of the top five most useful app for pediatricians. According to the pediatric annals review, Pedi Quikcalc is ranked number three. For very low costs, Pedi Quikcalc offers its users access to different conversion systems, weight-based medication dosages and IV fluid rates, an important one.
On the app, nurses can see blood pressure percentile, get bilirubin evaluation and check growth charts. Unfortunately, the app is not available for android devices. iOS users can download Pedi Quikcalc and install it from Apple App Store.
The app is also known for its ease of use, featuring important things for nurses like formularies, blood pressure calculator, eruption charts and dental numbering. It costs about five USD and is available for iPhones only, at the time of this publication.
6. Gahart’s IV Medications Handbook
As the name indicates, Gahart’s IV handbook is a comprehensive app made for healthcare practitioners as a reference for IV drugs. The handbook features more than 400 different types of intravenous drugs and will be of great help to any nurse.
The app can provide dosage information depending on age and is usually used for nurses who work with kids or neonatal and geriatric patients. This is because a majority of the IVs featured are mainly used for those three only.
Gahart’s handbook is very valuable and even well-known nurses and healthcare specialists find it quite useful. Users often complain about the cost, as the app only offers 10% of its quality content for free.
This means that you barely have access to anything so you have to pay between 26 USD to 50 USD to have access to a good part of the content. According to different reviews, Gahart’s handbook is rated about 4.6 averagely which may be worth the pay.
It is available for both android and iOS devices and has features that make its use really easier, including a searchable index, dosage charts, boxed warnings and nice calculators.
The content is often updated every time to match latest medical uses and is without a doubt one of the best apps for nurses.
7. Headspace
Headspace is a neat and popular app with more than ten million downloads. The app also boasts of more than ten million users and is rated 4.4 out of 5 by 270 thousand users. This is very impressive figure is not surprising as the features of the app earned it the ratings.
This app is included among the best apps for nurses because it helps people to relax, and nurses need this very much. You can do guided meditation and meditation for sleep on the app.
Headspace narrows down on meditation and has become one of the top best self care apps providing meditation instructions and sounds, over the past few years and will help anyone who is stressed out enjoy perfect rests and sleeps.
8. Perfect OB Wheel
Perfect OB Wheel is an app made to help nurses with menstrual dates, estimation dates of delivery, first trimester end dates and a lot of other things for healthcare specialists working in Obstetrics and Gynecology.
The OB in the name of the app means Obstetrics informing users that it is made to tell obstetric cycles. Perfect OB Wheel can help to estimate a lot of things using only ultrasound dates, conception dates, and last menstruation date.
Users can get estimation of fetal length and weight, expected due date, gestational age, conceptional age and a few other things that are really useful. Especially for nurses who work in a maternity, this app can be a very useful resource.
The app can track an infinite number of patients and also does postpartum tracking. Just like a few other healthcare apps, this app is limited to iOS devices only and costs less than two USD.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are frequently asked questions and answers about the best apps for nurses:
Perfect OB Wheel is an app made to help nurses with menstrual dates, estimation dates of delivery, first trimester end dates and a lot of other things for healthcare specialists working in Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Yes. Here is a list of some apps that are recommended for nurses and other healthcare specialists:
- Pedi STAT
- MDCalc
- Epocrates
- Pedi Quikcalc
- Gahart’s IV Medications Handbook
As the name indicates, Gahart’s IV handbook is a comprehensive app made for healthcare practitioners as a reference for IV drugs. The handbook features more than 400 different types of intravenous drugs and will be of great help to any nurse.
The app can provide dosage information depending on age and is usually used for nurses who work with kids or neonatal and geriatric patients. This is because a majority of the IVs featured are mainly used for those three only.
Conclusion
Nurses often have to make references to books or resources but instead of doing that, there are apps built to help with calculations and a lot more.
Some of these apps can help to track pregnancies and recommend drugs and dosage. Using the pieces of information you input, these apps can help to identify any pill. All of these features are very helpful for nurses and other healthcare specialists. This article has listed the best apps for nurses according to user reviews and other factors.
Kindly leave a comment if this was helpful and share this article to any nurses or healthcare practitioners you know.
References
Nursejournal.org: 25 Must-Have Mobile Apps for Every Nurse
Nurse.org: 10 Mobile Apps for Nurses
Nursegrid.com: Top 7 Apps for Nurses
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