After a week of sitting in iTunes store limbo, RxCalc 1.1 was finally approved and released for download yesterday afternoon. For those of you that don’t know about RxCalc, it is a pharmacokinetics calculator made by Apple Core Labs specifically designed to handle aminoglycoside and vancomycin kinetics, i.e. new starts and adjustments. It’s exciting for me because I was involved in the creation of the application. You can read more about what drove the idea and the development of RxCalc here if you’re interested.
The original version of RxCalc was designed with one thing in mind, to give me the functionality I needed to perform routine pharmacokinetic calculations. The application focused heavily on the math, which has never been an issue. However, the user interface (UI) and options were very basic. It did the job well, but wasn’t very flexible for users outside my sphere of influence. That was evident in much of our user feedback.
So, what’s new in 1.1? You won’t see a lot of changes to the basic UI, but the functionality and usability are significantly better. The user can now configure Units of Measure and adjust the constants used for Volume of Distribution calculations for both the aminoglycosides and vancomycin. This should give people other than myself a much better user experience, i.e. our friends outside the US.
In addition we’ve made some minor changes to the navigation, which on the surface may not be noticeable to many, but gives the end user the ability to freely move between data fields and scroll top to bottom without having to lower the keyboard. Like I said it’s a small thing, but it makes a big difference. And the coup de grace, a nice new icon courtesy of Mr. Layne Lev.
In a nutshell, RxCalc 1.1 now offers:
- User configurable Units of Measure
- Height (centimeters or inches)
- Weight (kilograms or pounds)
- Serum Creatnine (mg/dL or micromol/L)
- Configurable Volume of Distribution
- Aminoglycoside (0.2 liters/kg to 0.5 liters/kg)
- Vancomycin (0.5 liters/kg to 1 liter/kg)
- Less rigid scrolling
- Less rigid data entry
