With the bewildering range of choices faced by consumers nowadays, it’s more important than ever for individuals to take an active role in managing their own health care. Medical HouseCall, a new interactive medical guide from Applied Medical Informatics, is a painless way for people to learn about diseases, tests, and therapies. To install Medical HouseCall, you need 11MB of disk space, although you can get by with as little as 4MB if you don’t install all the sections. You can run the program in black-and-white, but it looks best on a color monitor. HouseCall sports a clean interface that’s a cinch to use, even without reading the manual. (The only glitch I encountered was the overwriting of text and buttons when I made the window too small.)
Medical HouseCall is divided into four main parts; symptom analysis, drug interactions, medical records, and an encyclopedia. Armchair diagnosticians will enjoy the section on symptom analysis most of all. You begin by entering your age and sex and choosing a symptom category... After you have responded to a suite of yes-or-no questions about what’s troubling you, you can answer follow-up queries or enter more symptoms in another category.
Eventually, HouseCall offers a list of possible diseases, with percentages indicating the likelihood that each illness is actually causing your symptoms. Clicking on an entry displays information about that condition from HouseCall’s database. As you would expect, the more information you provide, the more accurate HouseCall’s guesses are likely to be. Still, because the program can’t take into account vital information such as physical-exam and lab results, don’t expect it to substitute for a trained medical professional, a caveat echoed by frequent disclaimers.
While not quite as entertaining as symptom analysis, HouseCall’s remaining three sections are even more informative. For example, you can query the computer about the potential interactions and side effects of almost 3000 medications, from aspirin to zyloprim, including alcohol and caffeine. HouseCall also provides valuable pointers on the proper use and special cautions for each drug. For the truly compulsive, another section lets you create a comprehensive medical record for everyone in your family. (If you’re worried about being too compulsive, there’s a section on obsessive-compulsive disorders.)
HouseCall’s medical encyclopedia lets you access a variety of topics, including drugs, diseases, medical tests, injuries, poisons, and nutrition. Throughout the program, clicking on colored text (which shows up in bold on monochrome monitors) brings up more information about that particular item.
My only serious gripes with the program are with the quality and accuracy of the pictures in HouseCall’s database. Most of the artwork is in the form of line drawings (possibly to conserve disk space); I would like to see a CD-ROM version with full-color photos and renderings. Worse yet, I found several cases where medical images were labeled incorrectly (for example, the spine MRI actually shows a CT scan of the abdomen, and the pregnancy ultrasound is really from a heart exam).
The Last Word
Even though Medical HouseCall isn’t perfect, I recommend it for anyone interested in becoming more knowledgeable about health care.
Tessler, Franklin N., M.D. (February 1995). Medical HouseCall 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 75).
Applied Medical Informatics
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
20 / 
2020-03-16 / 
cfc65fe8c3b2566942ff582c95fd147bc0808306 / 
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HouseCall.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
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