Ideas That Work: Apps in the OR

Surgical apps provide surgical teams with instant access to a wealth of useful information, points out Adela Cuel, RN, CNOR, an OR nurse in Kingston, Tenn. She says the following apps can be purchased for around $1, and their content could help improve patient care:

• ScrubUp lets you create physician preference cards that can be easily shared with other members of the surgical team. The app also allows you to take photos of instruments and back table setups that can be viewed by your colleagues.
• MedAbbreviations provides instant access to more than 14,000 medical abbreviations, so you’ll know what shorthand notes and acronyms stand for and — more importantly — what they mean.
• MedMnemonics allows you to memorize medical terms more easily by matching them with rhymes, phrases or associative mental techniques.
• Medimath contains 144 medical calculators and scoring tools, so you’ll spend less time crunching numbers and more time caring for patients.
• MediBabble Translator is a language translation platform that has audio of prepared text relevant to multiple medical and nursing activities.
• CheckAid gives your team access to constantly updated checklists they can use to prepare patients for surgery.

“Using apps to communicate with patients, their families and their loved ones before and after surgery is becoming the norm,” says Ms. Cuel. “The use of apps that help providers should increase as well.” OSM