It’s easy to feel lost in the new world of medical applications. We’re here to help, downloading the apps most relevant to emergency medicine and distilling them down to their essential parts. This month we start with drug reference apps.

Between the Olympics and the elections, 2012 brought us plenty of distracting media to consume. Fortunately for patients everywhere, many research labs and companies remained hard at work with the aim of solving problems facing emergency medicine. Here we summarize 12 of the most impressive – or at least provocative – innovations of the year.

There is an age old problem in medicine. How can any physician keep up with the deluge – the absolute avalanche – of literature and information coming out each month? There are all of the obvious avenues for eduction, but there is one method that has often gone underappreciated: hanging out at the proverbial watercooler.

In April, we wrote about the use of social networks for physician-physician communication and concluded that while there is much potential, the ultimate online physician network probably does not exist yet. In this article we turn our focus to social networks that enable physicians to communicate with patients.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have ushered in new ways for physicians to get in hot water. From malpractice to bad taste, here are a few cases to be aware of before you start posting any information about your professional life online.

While some still debate the relative merits of direct vs. video laryngoscopy, the newest set of laryngoscopes make it easy, offering the best of both worlds.

You’re reading the polished, final version of this article. With any luck, EPMonthly’s editors have scrubbed the typos away and tweaked some of our awkward phrasings. The comments we made to each other, the tracked changes – all gone. Thank goodness, right? We might be embarrassed if you could see how little time we spent on the first draft.

Another ACEP Scientific Assembly has come and gone. As the dust settles, Tech Doc Jason Wagner reviews a few of the shining stars from the exhibit hall floor.

We store our email online. Documents. Photos. Financial information. Various companies offer these services, and one -- Google -- does them all, very well, for free. Why not add health information to the mix?

When I left Manhattan for the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) annual meeting in Boston, I was ready for a change of scenery. We had gone live with a new information system in our emergency department just a month before. While the vendors thought it went smoothly enough, and the financial hit seemed (for the most part) mitigated, I was still fielding a lot of requests from my physician colleagues.