I have put together this list of free applications from the medical section of the iTunes App Store. (You may also recognize many of them from the Top 10 list on mobilehealthnews.com.) To find these applications, just search the App Store using your iPhone or iPod Touch.

I hope you find these useful. If anyone knows of other handy apps, please share with the group or e-mail me at arawlinson@btmg.com.

1. Epocrates Rx - The Epocrates iPhone application allows the user to view continually updated clinical data. Once downloaded, the user can check for drug-drug interaction, identify pills by physical characteristics and perform medical calculations such as BMI and GRF. Epocrates is customizable to the user's specialty and practice.

2. Skyscape Medical Resources - Skyscape provides a collection of medical information for healthcare professionals. The resources include RxDrugs, evidence-based clinical information on diseases and symptoms, Archimedes Medical Calculator, and up-to-date MedAlert drug information.

3. EyeChart - The Snellen Eye Chart is an eye chart used to measure visual acuity. The original chart is placed at 20 feet, but this iPhone application is to be held at 4 feet for a rough acuity screen.

4. Taber's Medical Dictionary - Taber's Medical Dictionary app contains over 60,000 terms, a thousand photos and 600 patient care statements. In addition, Taber provides definitions and other resources, such as nutrition and alternative therapy, coverage, medical abbreviations and units of measurements.

5. MedCalc - MedCalc is a free medical calculator that gives the user access to an array of medical formulas and scores. Other features of this app include custom overlaid controls, support for U.S. and international units, bibliographic reference for formulas and lists of recently used equations.

6. Davis's Drug Guide - Davis's Drug Guide provides up-to-date, comprehensive and practical information on over 5,000 brand name and generic drugs. This application also displays information on potential drug-drug and drug-food interactions, appendices with dose calculations, customizable bookmarking and patient safety information.

7. Eponyms - Eponyms displays a short description from more than 1,600 medical eponyms (for example, Sheehan's syndrome). This application is free for students.

8. STAT ICD-9 LITE - STAT ICD-9 LITE provides all 13,677 ICD-9-CD diagnosis codes to the user's iPhone or iPod Touch for quick retrieval by disease classification in a drill-down format, with no typing.

9. PubMed On Top Lite - PubMed On Tap Lite searches PubMed to provide and display reference information. This application has all the features of the full version except for a shortened display of five records returned per search. Other features of this application include EZproxy support, internal Web browser, option to email results in text or RIS form, advanced search options, and remember/recall recent searches.

10. Cardio Calc - Cardio Calc is an application designed help manage patients with cardiovascular disease or hyperlipidemia. The features of this application include Framingham and Reynolds Risk Scores to determine cardiovascular risk and use of the CHADS2 score to guide treatment in atrial fibrillation.

Adrian Rawlinson, M.D., is the Director of Medical Informatics at Brown & Toland Physicians.