App Synopsis:

Unbound Medicine’s Ucentral app is a portal for medical reference and textbooks, not unlike Skyscape. Included in my review bundle:

• 5-Minute Clinical Consult
• A-Z Drug Facts
• Drug Interaction Facts
• Medline Journals
• Review of Natural Products

Most Apropos to Med Students and Physicians:

– 5-Min Clinical Consult is quite a potent little tool. This re-purposed textbook has multiple modalities for looking up a broad array of clinical type queries one might have.

The Topics search function is quick and intuitive, and unlike epocrates has all of the information on a single scrollable page, and the content provided betrays it’s textbook origins by being quite in-depth.

Images is also handy, possessing a decent (but definitely expandable) bank of clinical photographs to aid in visual diagnosis and comparison.

Medications within 5-Min is unique in that when a search for, let’s say “Heparin” is entered, the user is whisked away to a screen of Arterial Emboli and Thrombi, putting a new spin on medication look-up that differentiates the app from epocrates or even Ucentral’s own A-Z Drug Facts.

–  A-Z Drug Facts has a good index of meds by both generic and Brand Names, which is useful (N’ice Vitamin C Drops is included for example, as is Nicorette).

– Review of Natural Products has the potential to be very useful depending on one’s patient population. One unique feature of it is the Therapeutic Index search function, which allows one to search by ailment, then for each ailment search through the potential natural therapies and look up their efficacy, MOA and dosing. Herb-Drug index is also an intuitive and easy to use quick little cross-referencer.

That which is lacking or needs Improvement :

– Needs an iPad version. Epocrates and quite a few other medical apps are guilty of this as well, but the upscaling really does this app no favors, and could be potentially wonderful in 5-Min’s Algorithms function.

– A-Z Drug Facts could really use a searchable index of drugs nicknames or abbreviations, which are finicky and by nature ephemeral, could be invaluable to a clueless med student.

– Aesthetically and from a pure design point, kinda meh. Not in any way that hampers functionality, but the overall look of the app doesn’t take

– Medline Journals is essentially useless unless one already has a subscription to Annals of Internal Medicine, BMJ, JAMA, and NEJM. I suppose it might be useful to some to have a selection of periodically chosen abstracts from the big-name journals, but being unable to truly access them is really not convenient (with convenience being the raison d’être of the app itself).

Overall:

Ucentral as a whole earns a healthy 4/5 on the Innovator’s Medical Student Scale of Merit and Usability. It is quick, intuitive, ripe with content and when given to a little exploring provides a few truly unique ways of finding the information one might need.