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Keeping Up With New Things: Nurse Decides To Go Back To School

Nursing instructors grading Exams in the 1950s. Courtesy of Johns Hopkins Medical Archives on Flickr.


I remember it well. Cramming all night for a nursing exam, taking the test, and hoping for the best. It was a nerve racking experience for the students, but I’ve always wondered what it was like for the instructors. Check out these old gals. Grading papers was time consuming before computerized tests, but I bet they got some pretty entertaining answers.

Miss Jones, Medical Surgical Instructor: “Oh my God, I can’t believe this answer. It’s right up there with the excuse, “my dog ate my care plan.”

Mrs. Smith, OB/GYN Instructor: “I know what you mean. These young people are the future of our profession. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Nurse Ratched's Place*

Ivy League Medical Schools Embracing Technology For Teaching

Add Yale’s School of Medicine to the growing list of medical schools that are embracing the iPad as the primary source of medical teaching.

This upcoming year Yale will be giving their medical students, all 520 of them, an iPad 2 with an external wireless keyboard. We’ve covered with great depth the growing list of medical schools using iPads as the main tool for learning — such as Stanford, UC-Irvine, and many more.

“Yale School of Medicine this year will outfit all students with iPads and no longer provide printed course materials. The initiative, born out of a going-green effort, could Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

More Specialty-Specific Apps Are Coming On The Market

The explosive growth of medical applications for smartphones, launched by the  debut of the innovative Apple iTunes App store in 2008, promises to fundamentally change the physician’s tool set. While many specialties have always been heavily dependent on technology, such as radiology and cardiology, the ubiquity of these small, interconnected computers means that every physician will soon have access to a broad array of software and hardware to help them perform their daily work.

At iMedicalApps.com, we have been reviewing the most interesting medical apps on the market today as well as watching for trends in mobile medical technology. The most popular categories thus far have been clinical reference and utility apps.  Some of the largest download numbers have been for apps that provide drug and disease reference information, such as the encyclopedic Medscape app, or medical calculators.

However, more targeted apps that are specialty specific are slowly coming on the market. Some early ones, not surprisingly, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

Medical School To Require Incoming Students To Purchase iPads

In a little seen nugget published in an article of the Chronicle, the Ivy League medical school, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, will be requiring their incoming medical students to use the Inkling e-book app for key medical textbooks in their first year of medical school.

They will be requiring their incoming first year class to purchase iPads as well.

We have been the first to report how and why Inkling is a game changer in the arena of medical e-books when we reviewed Ganong’s Review of Medical Physiology:

Ganong’s Review of Medical Physiology for the iPad allows you to highlight, write notes, view innovative multimedia modules, and easily search for content — taking what you can do on a paper based textbook to a higher level — and taking e-learning to a completely different stratosphere.

The three key Inkling textbooks that will be required by Brown University’s medical school: Essential Clinical Anatomy, Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy, and Bates’ Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking.

The medical school’s director of preclinical curriculum, Luba Demenco, had the following thoughts to share with the Chronicle on the iPad implementation into the curriculum: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

iPads For All First-Year Medical Students?

Stanford plans to provide all first-year medical students with a 32 GB WiFi iPad. The students are already familiar with them, the tablet enhances how they view course content and take notes, it allows better access to textbooks, and it’s environmentally friendly.

Good thing they’ll become doctors, because one blogger says the iPad is an ergonomic nightmare. It’s too heavy to use for long stretches, and even Steve Jobs has to be a contortionist to balance it while reading. (Scope-Stanford School of Medicine, Suite101.com)

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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