What can I do with my Visor /
Palm Pilot / TRG once I get it?
By Dirk
For our St. George's University School of Medicine Class of 2003, with Love J
Okay, so now you've purchased one. What kinds of things can you do with it?
1) Look at some other web pages' suggestions :
2) Look at the ZDNet Handheld Supercenter.
3) Are you an AMSA member? AMSA members get to download some cool software for free, like the Merck Manual, Patient Tracker software, etc. (You will need your AMSA ID number, which is on your AMSA card, or in the corner of your "New Physician" magazine label.) The Merck is obviously useful. I downloaded the Patient Tracker software, which seems pretty cool, but I haven't figured it out yet. Not sure if it will be clinically useful or not (because of its learning curve), but it does allow you to track all kinds of data about a patient and then print it out wirelessly through the IR port to an IR-enabled laser printer, like most of the HP Lasers are.
4) Turn your Handspring Visor into a pager, a radio, an MP3 player, a voice recorder, a cell phone, a wireless modem, or more by looking at the Handspring Springboard Module collection.
5) Want to brush up on your Pharm for the USMLE? Look at the free Pharm Deck Palm Pilot download from Kaplan. (You may need to register, for free, with kaptest.com before being able to download this!)
6) Want to brush up on a few USMLE questions? Look at the free Qbank Palm Pilot download from Kaplan. (Again, you may need to register, for free, with kaptest.com before being able to download this.)
7) Read the daily New York Times, Rolling Stone, Weather Channel, Medstudent.com, New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and more in your Palm/Visor/TRG (for free!) by visiting Avantgo.com.
8) Turn your Palm/Visor/TRG into a kick-butt Pharm reference by visiting ePocrates.com. This is too cool to believe. Not only does it update itself on a daily basis, just in case drugs get added or pulled off the market or changed, but they are also developing a palmtop drug/bug antimicrobial database. Their new product promises to help you figure out not only which antimicrobial to use if you have an e.Coli infection of the nucleus pulposus, but also empiric therapies (like what to prescribe empirically for a suspected pneumonia in a 55-year-old Elvis impersonator from Tennessee who smokes J ). Amazing stuff coming down the line from these folks.
9) Need a medical calculator, Tarascon ePharmacopeia ("the #1 pharm reference for handhelds"), article reader, and more? Look no forther than the Medscape medical download page. You may have to register for free before being able to download from this page. I have no experience with the Tarascon reference, but the page has lots of stuff to offer, definitely worth a look. Anyone who DOES have experience with Tarascon and can offer a review, please write me!
10) Want to add some cool games, utilities, or other programs? Look at the Palm.com collection of shareware (much of it free!) for the Palm OS. (I recommend the chess game -- Everyone has it, and it plays one player, two player, or against itself! Tetris-like games are also very popular.)
11) A new one from a good friend!! The About.com Medical Palmpilot Software Page has all sorts of interesting things, from ICD-9 databases to oddly, an anatomy review program from Kaplan that I couldn't even find at Kaplan.com.
I hope this has been a help in choosing and using your handheld computer. If anyone has any more info they'd like to share, or anything interesting, email me and maybe we'll make this an ongoing web page.
Good luck to everyone on the boards.
- Dirk ;)