Skyscape Medical Resources review

Damien McFerran

We review Skyscape Medical Resources, an iPhone application aimed at medical professionals

Published on Sep 10, 2009

The recent hubbub regarding the worldwide outbreak of Swine Flu just goes to show how quickly the general public can whip themselves into a frenzy when there’s a good old-fashioned medical emergency on the cards.

It also proves how demanding and stressful it can be to work in the healthcare industry.

If you’re a medical professional you’re expected to be a veritable goldmine of information, able to dish out prognosis after prognosis with unerring reliability.

However, expecting even the most learned doctor to have all the answers is rather unrealistic, but at least with handy iPhone applications like Skyscape Medical Resources available they at least have a fighting chance.

Skyscape is essentially a repository of vital medical information that is intended for use when doctors or nurses are on call or performing their usual rounds.

The idea is that when such a person is faced with a medical situation – no matter how small – they can pull out their iPhone and instantly have access to a wealth of important data on symptoms, cures and doses.

The application requires you to sign up to the Skyscape account before it can be used and once you’ve done so you can tailor things to suit your own personal needs. Several free resources are available for downloaded once you’ve got things up and running.

These include RxDrugs (which contains information on different drugs, as well as a dosing calculator), Outlines in Clinical Medicine (data on disease and possibly symptoms), Archimedes (a decision-making resource) and MedAlert (a medical journal which is periodically updated with the latest findings in several fields of healthcare).

As well as these free components you can pay to purchase other modules, although you should be warned that the pricing for a yearly subscription is pretty steep – but then this is intended for use by serious industry professionals and not amateur armchair physicians.

Finding your way around Skyscape is relatively easy, providing you know what you’re looking for. Although the application is made up of different modules, they all use a similar interface. Naturally, a layman will struggle to make sense of the various terms and explanations but then as we’ve already established, they’re not the intended audience.

Having all of this salient data at your fingertips is a real boon and we can imagine this will make the jobs of medical workers a heck of a lot easier, but there are some unfortunate issues which muddy the water somewhat.

For example, Skyscape is frustratingly unstable, with random crashes occurring on a regular basis. Also, it took us several attempts to download the free modules, with the app telling us that an internet connection wasn’t available despite the fact we were using WiFi.

Such tardiness could prove to be very annoying if you’re a nurse on the job trying to find a dosage for a seriously distressed patient and for that reason Skyscape comes recommended, albeit with a slight degree of caution.

While its massive database of information is impressive, the developer needs to iron out the reliability to make it truly indispensable.