August 13, 2014
Eye Handbook—the first comprehensive mobile app for eye care providers and staff, nurses, primary care doctors, emergency medical personnel, surgeons and specialists—just released an extensive reconstruction of form and function. Since Eye Handbook’s creation five years ago, this free app has been downloaded more than one million times, with 300,000 health care users across the globe.
“The Eye Handbook team has worked diligently to maximize the app’s usefulness to practicing eye doctors, including a whole section devoted to ICD-10 coding. We’ve kept all the features that ophthalmologists and other eye care providers have come to rely on, and added or enhanced features to make this the most powerful pocket reference in eye care,” noted Ken Lord, MD, Eye Handbook Chief Editor, who is a vitreoretinal specialist in St. George, Utah.
This free mobile app is not only useful to doctors, but also to nurses, emergency medical personnel, paraprofessionals and other eye care staff members as an accurate and comprehensive reference. The new version of Eye Handbook includes:
-Medical Calculators
-ICD-10 coding
-Audio and Video downloads
-Eye Atlas
-Eye Wiki
-Forums
-User directory
-Ophthalmology and Optometry Journals
-Medication and Pharmacopeia
-Journals
-Eye Diagrams
Patient Education tools
-RSS Feeds
-Acronym List
-DDX
-Dictionary
-Eponyms
-Genetics
-Mnemonics
-Workups
-Testing
-Treatment Reference
-Vision Symptoms
Eye Handbook has been lauded by bloggers and industry experts as “jam-packed” and “huge in its scope and huge in its ambition.” The most passionate recommendations come directly from users:
Great for all eye specialists but also anyone in the medical profession.
Well done and very useful from a resident physician.
It’s fantastic in a pinch, and the dictionary is a must to interpret esoteric acronyms.
The icd-10 codes are great and the patient ed stuff is perfect.
The secret to EHB’s success is the quality and breadth of the eye health and eye care information. The list of
Section Editors and contributors is formidable.
“The standard we’ve always reached for is a resource that each of us can trust in our daily clinical practice. Everything added in the past three years has been intended to inform clinicians with the latest information and educate the eye care patient in a way that clinicians can trust,” Dr. Lord said.
Eye Handbook was created in 2009 by Dr. Lord and two colleagues, all of whom were ophthalmology residents at the time. The other co-creators are Rohit Krishna, MD, a glaucoma subspecialist and Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Medicine (where the three developers met), and Vinay Shah, MD, a vitreoretinal specialist and Clinical Associate Professor at Dean McGee Eye Institute at the University of Oklahoma.
Since the launch of Eye Handbook, Drs. Lord, Krishna and Shah have created another app platform, called Doctor App, which is a mobile application that physicians purchase, customize for their practices, and then offer to patients free of charge.
“When a smartphone is equipped with the Eye Handbook app, it becomes a tool you rely on, and a direct link to information you need every day. We thought: ‘If an app is so useful to us, why not provide doctors and their patients with an app that will put high quality ophthalmic services and information right at their fingertips?’” noted Dr. Lord.
The astounding growth of mobile commerce is a strong indicator of how much more consumers are using their mobile devices to make decisions, purchase services and conduct their personal business. Currently 61% of the US population owns a smartphone, and on average, smartphone users spend 127 minutes a day using mobile apps than surfing the worldwide web. The number one topic in mobile search? Health information.
