Epocrates & iPhone: Everything You Expected Plus Pill Pics

11 July 2008 in geekery, medicine, productivity | No comments

Today is the beginning of the rest of your life - a life without antiquated paperback pharmacopeias. A life of ease and convenience. Yes, you guessed it - Epocrates Rx is finally available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. All the usual information is included (dosing, cost, interactions, pharmacology, etc.), and because Apple worked directly with Epocrates during development the interface is excellent and the layout is stunning. Yes, I just said that a drug reference has a stunning layout.

But all that is old hat - I mean, Palm-based devices are still mired in technology from the 1990s and they’ve had these capabilities for years. The really cool part of Epocrates for the iPhone is the integration of pill pictures (which have been available from Epocrates online for quite some time). This finally solves one of my most vexing problems on the wards: despite all the pharmacology I’ve learned, I have absolutely no idea what most medications actually look like. Is glipizide a small blue tablet or a big pink gelcap? No clue. Now, when the pleasantly demented, morbidly obese woman admitted with altered mental status mumbles, “I’m on them sugar pills - you know, the little blue ones,” I’ll have some clue what she’s talking about. The Epocrates interface is intuitive - input any pill characteristics your patient can remember and Epocrates will display up to 25 matching pills. So if my diabetic lady can tell me that her pill is round, blue, and coated, I can look at the list of matches and guess that she’s on low-dose glipizide. And I can even show her a big picture of the pills to make sure that we’re on the same page. Pretty great, if you ask me.

Unfortunately, Epocrates is definitely hampered by the iPhone’s touch keyboard. The phone’s auto-correct feature does a good job with standard English, but it’s hopeless with medical jargon and drug names. When you’re in a hurry (and your hands are all greased up with emollient-laden hand sanitizer), the last thing you need is to keep typing “glioizide” instead of “glipizide.” Epocrates would be noticeably more user-friendly if it added all the drug names in its formulary to the phone’s dictionary, at least while Epocrates is the active application. Nevertheless, this is a minor criticism; Epocrates for the iPhone not only brings a classic application to Apple fans, it adds a slick user interface and a few genuinely useful new features. Pretty sweet for a free download.

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