H(OT) 5: Apps

Rachel Read, OTD, ORT/L, BCG, CAPS: Hi, welcome back to the H(OT) 5. This is Rachel Read, EHR clinical director here at FOX Rehab, joined by…

Jenn Ruoff, OTD, OTR/L, BCG: Jenn Ruoff, director of OT clinical services.

Rachel: So today we’re going to go over the top five apps for clinicians to use. And it really is apps that we have found to be successful in our model of doing house calls. But really, these can be applicable to any clinician out in the field as well.

So the first app that I want to talk about, being that we use a house calls model here at FOX, is really using a map for, you know, making your travel efficient. So whether it’s Google Maps or Waze or Road Warrior… And if I bring up my Google Maps here, I actually have my pin to my dashboard screen. So I just have the Google map and it just brings it up. Google Maps is really nice because it will save your home, your work, if you have like a main office. It also does trends based off of like where you travel frequently and then it could even go as far as kind of tell you when you have to leave to get somewhere on time and if there’s traffic. So I find that Google Maps, or really I think, you have Waze.

Jenn: Yeah, I use Waze. This is Waze. I like that this actually tells you if there’s a cop on your route, approaching bring down the speed a little bit.

Rachel: So we’re going to apologize because we’re battling some cold.

Jenn: Yeah yeah. Kind of goes into our next app.

Rachel: Oh yeah.

Jenn: Medscape.

Rachel: Go ahead.

Jenn: It’s a good one. We use this a lot. This allows you to do like a symptom tracker. So if you go out to see a client, you’re not sure… You know, they had some funky stuff going on. They’re complaining of shortness of breath. They’re having headaches. They’re not really sure what it’s related to… And you can’t see… You have the ability to kind of search the diagnosis, search the symptoms. You can also look up medications, which is so nice. If I see a medication that I’m not familiar with, I’ll throw it into the app, search it. It also gives you contraindications. It can give you side effects. So it’s really helpful for me as a clinician. You can also use that kind of as an educational service for your clients.

Rachel: Yes, absolutely.

There’s also some procedures in here. You know, they do have the Barthel Index. They have some screens that are more general screens because this is really a medical app, so it’s not OT-specific. But you might be able to find some of the common ones that the physicians may use as well.

So cool, have you looked up your symptoms?

Jenn: No, I have not looked them up yet because I figured I probably got it from you.

Rachel: Yeah.

Jenn: And you probably got it from..

Rachel: My kids.

Jenn: Your kids.

Rachel: Toddlers.

Jenn: That’s what’ll happen. I don’t know if that’s a symptom in there.

Rachel: Nah, probably not.

Jenn: Next one: podcasts. This is something that I utilize a lot when I am… Actually, my Waze is actively working right now. Podcasts: So I have an iPhone. On the Apple display, you have the ability to… It’s one of the loaded ones on your route.

I tend to listen to the FOXcast podcasts, OT, PT, and SLP and EP soon, too. But there are some other ones I look at of like good intervention ideas or even I just started through this podcast it was like a Cliff Notes of an audio book that I wanted to listen to. I don’t really have time to listen to the audio book. But I wanted to get some sort of Cliff Notes.

And then there’s some fun podcasts that I like to listen to to kind of break up my travel time when going from client to client. It’s a really quick way to be able to know bring up your routine if you want to take a break from listen to music it’s kinda neat.

Rachel: I do that a lot as well and I use Google Music to find my podcasts. So it really just depends on the system that you’re using the phone that you have as well. The next one yeah that we have, and you kind of have various options for this, is like a music app.

So whether you’re using Pandora, Spotify, or Amazon Music, we particularly work with a geriatric population and even more so with a lot of dementia clients. And these that population really responds well to music.

So you can often find me with like Frank Sinatra playing and I have my phone just in my pocket. And it really helps to engage the clients. You know, you can find a client is going to be difficult to get out of a chair. But if I start putting music on, you could start seeing, you know, they get a little rhythm in them and they’re ready to get up and get moving. And that’s just a great motivator and also, too, just having it in the background to kind of engage them as well.

Jenn: Yeah, I use this, too, when driving from patient to patient to break up the radio so you don’t have to listen all the commercials.

Rachel: When you’re not listening to your podcasts.

Jenn: When I’m not listening my podcasts, I’ll throw on some Amazon Music and just work way.

Rachel: And then our last one: So we use MedBridge here. All of our clinicians at FOX who are PT, OT, SLP, and EP get MedBridge accounts. So it’s unlimited CEUs through MedBridge. And I find that the MedBridge app is really helpful because you could do a number of things.

You can do your CEU courses through there. So maybe you’re not listening to music or your podcasts and you want to listen to a CEU course and kind of do that, you’re able to do that right from your phone, which I don’t think a lot of people know of the MedBridge app. I think it’s underutilized, especially here. I think it’s just something that people don’t really know it’s available.

Jenn: And you have the ability to bookmark the courses, which I love. So I’ll bookmark them and if I’m, you know, I don’t know, driving my car, taking the train. I just took the train into Philly last week. You can just listen to a little MedBridge course.

Rachel: And then we also use MedBridge for tracking of, like, just knowledge tracks — different things that we send out to our clinicians that, you know, are there to be completed. Because we are house-calls model, we don’t have typical brick and mortar where you’re all getting together for a meeting. And so we use that information to kind of disseminate through a knowledge track. And so you can access your knowledge tracks right from your phone as well. So, you know, if you know that you have one coming up and you need to get it done, you can pop it on the phone and listen.

Jenn: Cool. So those are our top five apps that we use for clinicians to help you be more efficient and complete your job on a daily basis.

Rachel: See you later.