The University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) has produced a Medical Encyclopedia which is available as a free iPhone App.  It can be downloaded at the Apple iPhone App Store or from iTunes.  The App contains 50,000 pages of  information that has been reviewed by medical professionals and that is updated regularly.  The pages are organized by categories - symptoms, injury, disease, surgery, nutrition, special topics, poison, and test.  When you retrieve an article, the date that it was last reviewed will be at the end along with the reviewer’s name and credentials.  Articles contain links to related content and to medical illustrations with text.  There is a search feature on the App home page, a search for a keyword or phrase returns all content relevant to that word/phrase.  Once you retrieve an article, you can bookmark it or email it.  There is also a link on the article which allows you to ask a UMMC expert a medical question related to your search. The expert won’t make a diagnosis but he will provide explanations of diseases and conditions and direct you to additional information. 

Another feature of the App is the ability to link to numerous topic-specific videos which are on UMMC’s youTube channel. 

To test the App out for this blog, I searched for information on “sinusitis”.  First I chose the Disease category - after scrolling through a very long (but comprehensive!) list of medical conditions, I finally got to the “s’s”.  Chosing sinusitis brings up an article with an overview of the topic and links to symptom, treatment, prevention, “all information”, related articles, and a list of references.  As advertised, at the end of the article is the reviewer’s name as well as his or her professional credentials.  The link to email the article is at the bottom of the “page”.  In the Ask the Expert box you can “Get answers to your Ear, Nose and Throat questions”.  The search box at the top of the App also worked fine.  Typing in “sinusitis”, retrieved the same article and the same links.  So you can retrieve the information that you need in 2 ways – by chosing a category and then scrolling through the list (useful if you are not sure how to spell the term) or by typing your search term directly into the search box. 

In my opinion, iPhone users should download this App.  After all, everyone needs a medical encyclopedia from time to time – how handy to be able to easily carry one around with you.  Anytime you need it, you can access current medical information, information that has been reviewed by a health professional at a reputable university medical center.  And it’s free!

(Note:  If you don’t have an iPhone, you can access the Medical Encyclopedia at the UMMC website.)

Submitted by: Alice McCreary, Reference Librarian
on January 29, 2010 - 2:24 pm

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