 Medical Calculators
To start with, we would recommend reading the article entitled Clinical calculators for hand-held computers, written by Dr. Stewart Cameron (from Dalhousie's Department of Family Medicine), in Canadian Family Physician magazine (September 2003).
Of the hundreds of medical calculators available, the two freeware PalmOS medical calculators listed above are the most useful, and widely used, and are therefore our recommendations. Although there is some overlap between the two, each has different strengths. MedCalc in particular has a feature where calculation results can be saved under a patient's name, for future reference.
Another free option is Skyscape's Archimedes medical calculator. It takes up 660KB (big for a calculator), but contains over 70 formulas, and integrates well with other Skyscape products. It also supports both PalmOS and PocketPC units. However, it does not allow you to sort formulas, and it does not accept input in SI units (making it of very limited utility for the world beyond the US borders).
Of the variety of more specialized calculators, PregCalc Pro ( www.medicaltoolbox.com )
for pregnancy-wheel type calculations, DoseCalc ( pocket-doc.com )
for drug dosage calculations, and ABGPro ( www.stacworks.com )
for arterial blood gas calculations are the most widely used, most of which
are freeware or shareware. In addition, statcoder.com has
a variety of useful (and free) calculators covering protocols for things like
cholesterol or perioperative cardiovascular evaluation. There are also free
calculators for opioid dose conversions from www.paincare.ca and
Johns
Hopkins.
Two calculators that are specific to pediatrics are worthy of mention. The
first is the free Growth Charts from StatCoder.com ( www.statcoder.com ),
which automates the June 2000 revision of the CDC Growth Charts. The second
is Kidometer ( www.kidometer.com ),
an inexpensive program which contains age-based normals for: Adolescence, Basic
vitals, Cardiology, Development, Endocrinology, Growth and Nutrition, Hematology,
Laboratory, Prevention, Resuscitation, Trisomy 21, and Vaccine. The latest version (4.4) also includes SI units, which is a welcome change for users outside the United States.
A number of all-in-one programs, such as PEPID, include their own integrated
medical calculators. ePocrates has a free suite of calculators named MedTools
for ePocrates users (you must have ePocrates installed for them to work). Some
of them are available separately, such as STAT Cholesterol.
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