LIFEDRIVE: PREGWHEEL.

Pregwheel is a simple program written by a person calling himself Slade. Unfortunately, the website listed, Sladeandmegan .com appears to be a commercial trap. I am not certain whether there is a misspelling of the URL or if this is actually the site.

Anyway, I have had the opportunity to use quite a few OB programs in the past, but many are simply cumbersome. One particular program that I utilized a few years ago, before my Lifedrive days, promised to do just about everything: Store patient data, calculate dates, post reminders etc. Unfortunately the writer charged $19.99 for the honor and kept on updating the program almost every month. The data was not transferrable and I spent a lot of time reentering the data every time he found a glitch. I felt as if I was paying for a beta product.

Pregwheel is a program that has replaced the cumbersome wheel that I usually carry around (and lose :)). It is a freeware program and can be found on PDAMD.COM or www.healthypalmpilot.com. It doesn't do alot of fancy tricks and it is so deceptively simple that I thought that it would be worth a shout on my pages after having used this for a few years.

Essentially, this program does exactly as it states. It substitutes for a pregnancy wheel. You put in your LNMP and your reference date (ie. today) and it produces a host of information, including the date of probable ovulation, the estimated due date and of course the pregnancy status (ie. number of weeks pregnant).

However, where this program excels is in its simplicity. The program shows only 5 lines of data:

LNMP
Prob. Ovulation
Due Date
Preg Status
Ref. Date.

That's it!

But You get the added bonus of being able to enter all but the Pregnancy status as your initial point of entry. This is a God-Send when you have an ultrasound report giving a due date that is off by several weeks. You can even change the reference date to reflect how far along the patient was when the ultrasound was taken.

Given the days of Google, where simplicity and an uncluttered screen are the order of the day, I have found this program immensely helpful when someone walks into the office for the first time. It's easy to use Nagel's rule to calculate the due date, but attempting to figure out how far along the patient is without using a wheel is a little more complicated.

This program has been out for a very long time, but it still stands the test of time and works extraordinarily well on the LIFEDRIVE.

LDD.