This was also noted by the Dutch Medical Journal: the interview The digital doctor (in Dutch) appeared in January 2011.
Good combination
Kubben and computers have been a good combination for a longer time. “Programming used to be a hobby, and as a medical student I teached programming at the faculty of psychology”, Kubben tells. During his medical clerkships he created a website with neurological patient cases, and during a study trip of the national E-learning taskforce of the Dutch Organization for Medical Education he discovered how PDAs were embraced by US and Canadian universities. “For some of those applications I created cheaper versions, which made me win the Student Software Award at the Slice of Life conference for two consecutive years.”
First
In 2008 Kubben bought his first iPhone, and soon discovered that the amount of neurosurgical apps was limited. He started programming – and with impressive results. He released 3 free apps for the iPhone: NeuroMind, Safe Surgery, and SLIC. NeuroMind contains neurological and neurosurgical scores, anatomical images and will contain decision support in 2011.
This app has been downloaded 40,000 times and made it into widely cited lists like the “Top 10 Free iPhone Medical Apps for Healthcare Professionals” (both in the original and the updated version). Safe Surgery is an app based on the WHO ‘Safe Surgery Checklist’ (more than 3,000 downloads) and SLIC offers decision support for the treatment of cervical spine injury (more than 4,500 downloads).
Open access
Kubben is - of course - pleasantly surprised by the downloads. “I never expected numbers of this kind!”, he says. This success stimulated the ‘open access’ journal Surgical Neurology International to appoint him as IT editor, with mobile apps, decision support and social media as special topics of interest. For the journal he developed an app that helps readers to stay up to date of the latest posts and articles (‘SNI Mobile’).
NeuroMind is now also available for iPad, for Android devices and in 2011 there will be a version for mobile internet (a test version is available at http://neurodss.com). The iPad version has been downloaded 10,000 times in the first five weeks.
Digital aids
The statistics are clear: Kubben is the developer of the world’s most downloaded neurosurgical iPhone and iPad app. “For what that is worth, of course… but it sounds very nice!”
But according to Kubben, “very nice” is not enough. He is convinced that in the future medical doctors will need digital aids as these. “In PubMed more than 700,000 articles are published every single year. Suppose that 0,1% is relevant for me, that requires me to read 2 articles each day. I wonder how many doctors do that. Of course we have guidelines, but often they are too long, if you happen to find the right guideline at all. So that doesn’t work. Guidelines need to be clear, fast, and applicable. Apps and computers can help to do that.”
Interactive decision
“I am convinced that –in the end- we will have interactive decision support tools that will replace our current static and rather unusable guidelines. That is where I want to go. This type of patient safety tools can be made available on a broad range of devices, both desktop and ‘out of your pocket’. This truly is patient safety made app-licable!”
Besides the Dutch interview in the Dutch Medical Journal, English interviews are available at iMedicalApps.com and at the American Medical Association’s newspaper.
Pieter Kubben works as a resident in neurosurgery at the Maastricht University Medical Center. He can be followed at his weblog (DigitalNeurosurgeon.com) and on Twitter (@DigNeurosurgeon).