The traditional pregnancy wheel may be a thing of past: ACOG Releases New Due Date Calculator Smartphone App

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has released a new Estimated Due Date (EDD) Calculator smartphone app that may soon replace the traditional plastic pregnancy wheel used by healthcare provider to calculate the EDD. 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vspringboard.acog.activity

 The EDD Calculator will be easy for patients as well as healthcare providers to use.

There are already nearly 1800 OB/GYN-related apps that fix –up the discrepancies between the calculated EDD by Last menstrual period and first ultrasound.

Nathaniel DeNicola, MD, digital and social media expert consultant and senior fellow at the Penn Social Media and Health Innovation helped to develop the app. He opined that having a firm due date may not matter during the first trimester but it does means a lot for the neonate and mother in third trimester.

This EDD calculator app is based on joint recommendation from ACOG, the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine for calculating pregnancy due dates. The app has the ACOG guidelines built into the logic; therefore it is the most accurate tool available to ob-gyn and related staff. It is built by ob-gyns for ob-gyns.

Many ob-gyns have the guidelines already memorized, but it does allow a quick access for them at time of emergency.

A study published in the journal of obstetrics and gynecology in June 2015, rated all the available apps using a newly developed APPLICATIONS scoring system. According to Katherine Chen, MD, MPH, professor and vice chair of obstetrics-gynecology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, "The ACOG EDD Calculator is an accurate app that received high marks for comprehensiveness, function and design, resulting in an APPLICATIONS score of 13 out of 16, that's the highest score among all of the other pregnancy wheel apps that my colleagues and I previously evaluated in our study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology in June 2015. In addition, it is the only pregnancy wheel app on the market that has a special feature that allows redating based on ultrasonography." said in the news release.

Dr. DeNicola also told Medscape News that “The EDD calculator allows the clinician to determine how far along a patient will be at a certain date and also to determine in advance when a patient will reach a certain gestational age.”If you want to know when a patient will be 32 weeks because they're going to start some kind of increased surveillance and have extra testing, you can plug it in and find out exactly when the patient will be 32 weeks.”

He also explained that  “The new EDD Calculator is part of the primary ACOG app, which can be downloaded for free at the App Store for Apple phones and Google Play for Android phones. "All the ACOG committee opinions are right there on the app, so that's very convenient.”

The app also includes ACOG news and annual meeting information.

For a detail description of the app visit the ACOG website. 

For Apple: Visit the App Store
For Android: Visit Google Play

References:

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/858723
http://www.acog.org/acogapp