February 2004, Vol 26, No. 2
Internet

What's in the web for family physicians - clinical tools

Alfred KY Tang 鄧權恩

1. Medic-8: Clinical Calculators and Medical E-Tools
http://www.medic8.com/MedicalTools.htm

The Medic-8 website hosts a long list of useful clinical tools. These clinical tools offer easy online references for family physicians in their everyday practice. A few useful examples of clinical tools available at the website include: predicted peak expiratory flow of male and female, a well illustrated diagram on Dermatome distribution, the Mini Mental Status Examination, the Geriatric Depression Scale (Koenig) and bedside treatment of benign positional vertigo.

2. Colours for the Colour Blind
http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/index.html

Family physicians who do not have a colour chart for screening of colour blindness in their office should consider having this website book-marked in your browser. The website has colour photos of Tests for Colour Blindness. It also lists sharewares for the colour blind and gives away links to other sites on colour deficiency. Your patients can now be screened for colour blindness while your computer is online, and with your browser pointing to this website. It provides a very handy tool for family physicians conducting medical check-ups.

3. MedCalc: Interactive Growth Charts
http://medcalc.com/growth/

Interactive Growth Charts offers handy tools for family physicians to tell the growth percentile in height and weight of a child. At the website, enter the child's age, height and weight; and a growth chart with the growth percentile of the child will appear. This offers a valuable reference to tell the parents on how well their child is nourished. Other clinical tools relating to Fluid and Electrolytes, Paediatrics and Obstetrics are also available at the website.

4. MDChoice.com - Clinical Calculators and Scoring Systems
http://www.mdchoice.com/calculators.asp

The website of MDChoice.com has a section on useful tools for practicing doctors. Myocardial infarction probability, Rash diagnosis algorithm, GI bleed complication risk are some of the useful tools available. The web-page has also a long list of clinical calculators for different purposes.

5. MedIndia.net
http://www.medindia.net/home.asp

The website has a lot of useful health risk calculators for your patients. The Smoke Risk Calculator gives your patient his life span loss calculated with his age when smoking started and the amount he smoked. Nutritional assessment gives hints on nourishment of a child by entering the height and weight. There are also various other cardiac tools and nutritional tools available for your patients. All these tools help to bring more insight to your patients regarding their diet, nutritional status and cardiovascular risks.

6. BNF Extra
http://www.bnf.org/BNFExtraCalculatorsFrame.htm

This popular website has a page on clinical tools and health calculators of different nature. A few useful examples include Body Mass Index, the Joint British Societies Cardiac Risk Assessor Program (which computes coronary heart disease and stroke risk as the percentage likelihood of an event over a period of 10 years), and the Body surface area calculated according to the Dubois formula.


Alfred KY Tang, MBBS (HK), MFM (Monash)
Family Physician in Private Practice

Correspondence to: Dr Alfred KY Tang, Shop 3A, 2/F, Hsin Kuang Shopping Centre, Wong Tai Sin, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China.

E-mail: alfredtang@hkma.org


Please note that this and previous editions of "What's in the Web for Family Physicians" are now on the links page of the Web site. All suggested sites are connected by hyperlinks and can be reached by a click of the mouse.