Medical School

Best apps for medical students Summer 2020

Are you wondering how you can up your study game? Trying to be a better student? Maybe you’re trying to find the quickest and easiest way to revise preclinical and clinical medicine. Well guess what, there’s an app for that!

Best Apps for: Learning

Clinical Years – Prognosis – Your Diagnosis – Price: Free – IOS & Android

This free app is great for practicing your diagnostic and disease management skills.

Loaded with tonnes of patient cases, this is essentially a game to train junior doctors. Built by over 200 physicians from 33 different specialities, Prognosis offers students an opportunity to manage a patient from presenting complaint, to diagnosis and management of the patient’s disease.

New cases are released every week, often in keeping with global endemic and epidemic trends, to help you brush up on the clinical skills that are the need of the hour!

The design is really intuitive and looks pretty good!

Preclinical Years – Muscle and Bone Anatomy 3D – Price: £4.99 – IOS & Android

Anatomy – some people find it easy and intuitive (or at least pretend they do), while for the rest of us it’s a real challenge to learn all of the boney, muscular, vascular and nervous anatomy. So much latin!

I always found that the practical aspects of anatomy teaching were far more useful than the lectures. Dissection is of course the best way of learning anatomy. When you can’t be in the dissection room with a cadaver, being able to interact with a three-dimensional replication of the human body is the next best thing.

Best used on a bigger screen, like an iPad or Tablet, the images on this are great and the quizzes are pretty good too.

For all students – Anki Flashcards – Price: Free – IOS & Android

I made the mistake of starting my flashcarding in a different app (Chegg) but this year will be moving over to the Anki Flashcards app. The app is used by almost all medical students in the UK and US, so you know it’s good!

Anki uses spaced repetition and AI to help you learn your content. Based on your performance and studying habits, the system will present you with your weaker subjects at a higher frequency , while mixing in your strong content to aid retention.

Best Apps for: On the wards

BNF Publications – Price: Free – IOS

The British National Formulary is the first point of call for all things clinical pharmacology. The App is only for use by individuals working or training in the NHS, Epocrates is an international alternative.

Use this on the wards to look up treatments drugs, dosages, interactions and licensed uses for medications. Really great for when patient knows what drug they are taking but they don’t know what for, which happens more than you might think.

Dem Dx – Price: Free – IOS

Dem Dx is a diagnostic pathway app, aimed to help healthcare professionals arrive at differential diagnoses for their patients. Preloaded with more than 10,000 clinical presentations, over 1500 differential diagnoses and a load of multiple choice questions, if you are finding yourself scratching your head following a patient history make sure to open this app and follow the prompts.

UpToDate – Price: Free to download then subscription fees – IOS

Need to double check certain medical information? Luckily, there is an app that can answer all those questions.

Up to date is brought to you by the same company behind Ovid (Wolters Kluwer), UpToDate provides the latest evidence based clinical practice at your fingertips. While it is aimed at an American audience, so local NHS guidelines should take precedence, the app is a great way of keeping up to date with best practice. Very aptly named!

Best Apps for: Looking after yourself

Headspace – Price: Free – IOS

Headspace is a great app for meditation and mindfulness, something a lot of us should probably be doing a lot more of. The first ten sessions guide you through the basics of mindfulness, and then from there you can subscribe for a tonne of great sessions.

Yoga Studio – Price: Free – IOS

An all-in-one yoga and meditation app, that gives you a range of free yoga flows to do at home. The videos guide you through each session with a range of classes for all yoga levels. The app does have a range of in app purchases for more lessons, but you have a load of free ones available.

Of course this list isn’t exhaustive, there are so many great apps out there for medical students. If you know of any that should have made the list, please let me know! You can do that through the contact page or via social media! (Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube).

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