TechTool Thursday 063 DxLogic

TechTool review DxLogic on iOS and website

DxLogic provides access to a database of likelihood ratios. Michael Garfinkle is a Nephrology Fellow from Canada, and has built up his database as a labour of love. The aim is to provide doctors with easy access to likelihood ratios to help them decide on whether or not a specific investigation is worthwhile, or whether a patient has a particular disease

Website: – iTunes – Website

Design

This is not the app’s best area. The app icon looks great, however you can’t help but feel a tad disappointed after opening the app.

It looks strange with some text in giant lettering and others at a regular size. The user interface is tricky to navigate – it would not have been possible for me to use the app without watching the five minute YouTube tutorial. An iOS app should be intuitive and able to be used without video instructions

User Interface

DxLogic iPhone 1

DxLogic iPhone 2

Clinical Content

The database contains over 700 likelihood ratios. You can:

• Choose by specialty, disease, presentation, or investigation
• View the positive or negative likelihood ratios
• Change the pre-test probability and use the app’s suggestions for how to estimate this
• View references and info about the articles used to derive the likelihood ratios

Cost

• Free – there are some paid features but they are mysteriously difficult to access.
• It is $2.49 to unlock the additional features, which isn’t too expensive

Room for Improvement

• The font size could be reduced by 50% and we would still all be able to comfortably read it
• There are clickable parts in the app that are well-disguised and I only found some of them from watching the YouTube tutorial – in iOS a button should look like a button
• The unlock option and functionality needs to be improved as it was only with great persistence that I managed to work out how to upgrade

Overall

Michael Garfinkle must have spent rather a long time working on this and he has done a great job in putting together a database of likelihood ratios. There is a massive amount of useful stats information and references in this database.However, the app lets his hard work down by being clunky to use and not very pretty. A simple redesign of the app graphics would allow this app to do justice to his efforts.

From the stats point of view, I’m not sure how likely you would be to use this app on a regular basis – depends on your pre-test probability, I guess

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABEUSK0-Ouo

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