After my blog post last week about The Top 6 Essential Apps for Optometry, I received several suggestions for additional apps that other optometrists regularly use in practice. I decided that there were enough great recommendations that I would do a Part 2 to the prior article so that you all could benefit from the great information that I received from our fellow colleagues! Enjoy!
Eye Handbook (Free)
The Eye Handbook (EHB) app has several great features that can be very useful for eye care providers on a daily basis. Below is a summary of some of the great things that can be utilized within this app:
- Forum: In this portion of the app, eye care providers can post photos and questions to help with diagnoses, treatment plans, contact lens management, etc., or you can just share interesting cases and pictures with other doctors.
- Calculator: There are many different calculations that are provided in the calculator portion of this app including: expected amplitudes of accommodation, expected add power based on age, glaucoma risk calculator, vertex conversion, adjusted IOP calculations, diopters to radius conversion, etc.
- Testing: Color vision, Amsler grid, near vision cards, OKN drum, Worth 4-Dot and several other tests are are easily accessible within this app. It is great to have all these tests available on your phone!
- Eye Atlas: There are many different conditions listed, each with a photograph (some with multiple photos). This can be a great tool to use for patient education when describing something that you see on your patient if you are unable to photograph it yourself.
- Vision Symptoms: This feature has photographs that simulate what symptoms will look like in certain ocular conditions including: scintillating scotoma, glaucoma, and macular degeneration. Again, this can be very helpful in explaining symptoms to watch out for during your patient education.
- Spanish: Several of the most important words or phrases that you may use are translated from english to spanish so that you can better communicate with your spanish-speaking patients. For example “Are you using eye drops?” translates to “Estas usando gotas?
There are may other features that can be utilized within this app as well such as videos, slides, and a medication reference.
Optics Clinical Calculator ($4.99)
Looking for an app to help you with optics calculations? This app has some great features that will make your life easier. No more looking up or trying to remember induced prism or slab-off calculations; this app will take care of it for you! In addition to crossed cylinder calculations, vertex distance compensation, and diopter to radius (mm) conversions, below are some helpful calculations that aren’t provided in other apps:
- Induced Prism/Slab Off: With this feature, the patient's Rx is input and the app will calculate the induced prism as the patient looks down through a bifocal lens. The calculator will then tell you the total prism between the eyes and determine if slab-off prism is indicated or not.
- Optical Center Decentration: This will help determine the amount of induced prism present in a pair of glasses using the patient’s Rx, optical center distance, and patient’s pupillary distance. This can also be used to determine that amount of decentration needed to induce a certain amount of prism in glasses if indicated for your patient.
- Intermediate/Near Rx: If you are trying to determine the add power for an intermediate Rx based on the patient’s distance and near Rx (at 40cm), this calculator is an easy way to do so. You just enter the patient’s distance and near add power (at 40 cm) and the intermediate distance that you desire, and it will calculate a single vision intermediate Rx, and an intermediate/near bifocal (or PAL) Rx.
Chromatic Vision Simulator (Free)
While this app may not be something that you would use on a daily basis, it’s a great app to simulate what a person who has a color vision deficiency sees. This app creates images of each color vision deficiency type by using photos from your phone's camera. This a a great tool to show parents or siblings of patients who have a color vision deficiency how their child or sibling actually sees the world.
CL Calcs ($4.99)
This app is a “lite” version of the EyeDock app. There are many fantastic features that are included in this app that are very helpful for all types of CL calculations or questions that you may have when fitting and managing your contact lens patients. These are described below:
- Lens Design: This feature allows you to input the patient’s manifest refraction, keratometry values, and vertex distance. Once this done, if you select “advice,” it will go through each type of contact lens available (spherical soft, spherical toric, spherical GP, and topic GPs) and guide you through whether this is a good or bad option for your patient. Once you determine which type of contact lens you would like to use, based on your numbers already input into the app, it will do the calculations and recommend a lens Rx to start with or order!
- Oblique cross-cyl: This portion of the app helps with determining the changes to make to contact lens power after providing the contact lens power, over-refraction, and lens rotation. This feature makes it so easy to adjust toric contact lenses without having to try to do your own calculations. This alone makes the app well worth the $4.99!
CL Calcs also does a vertex conversion from spectacle Rx to corneal plane and provides a conversion table. Additionally, it converts diopters to millimeters and has a conversion table for this as well. As mentioned before, there is another app called Eye Dock that includes all the features of the CL Calcs app, along with a searchable contact lens database and topical pharmaceutical lens database. This app requires membership to the Eye Dock website (eyedock.com), while CL Calcs does not.
Parks Three Step ($1.99)
In the prior Essential Apps for Optometry blog post, I had mentioned another Parks 3-Step app. This app has some additional information that the prior app does not. Not only does this app help isolate the paretic muscle in acquired vertical diplopia, but the maker of this app (Dr. Todd Zarwell) believes that you should never fully trust an app to make your clinical decisions, so he also provides additional explanations. The app explains how each test is used to determine the final result, while also helping you understand which muscles are the primary EOMs in different fields of gaze.
I hope that these apps can help make your life a little easier! Please comment below if you have found any other useful apps that have not been listed above or in my prior post!
-Dr. Dexter
The Top 15 Tips and Tricks for Studying for Part I of NBEO®
We’ve put together a ton of great tips and tricks for studying for Part I of NBEO along with two tailored study programs that will help you thoroughly prepare for the big day. Remember, you’ve made it this far and you can totally do this!
Some of the Top 15 Tips include:
- Familiarize Yourself with the Test Format
- Tackle the Weak Subjects Early
- Start Sooner and Ease Into It
- ...and 12 more!
