Are You One of the 50,000 Epocrates Users?

More than 50,000 US physicians have downloaded the Epocrates drug and formulary reference application to an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch. That's a healthy number, especially considering that the application has only been around for four months.

Handheld devices have long been used in the health care environment for recording and retrieving patient data. Before the iPhone, many of the applications used by health care professionals ran on Palm or Windows Mobile devices, and were often proprietary solutions developed to meet specific needs.

Coinciding with the launch of the 3G iPhone and the iPhone Apps Store, Epocrates released a professional drug guide for free. Epocrates provides on-demand drug information for health care professionals to reference during a patient consultation. A physician can use the iPhone with Epocrates to look up the correct dosing for a new medication, or enter a patient's list of drugs to check for potentially harmful interactions. The software also offers a pill identifier tool, which has been central to solving mystery pills patients bring in or cannot recall by name.

The software has been a hit.

"The early adoption and reception of our iPhone application has been phenomenal," said Kirk Loevner, chairman and chief executive officer for Epocrates. "Physicians appreciate how we have capitalized on the iPhone's advanced capabilities with the Epocrates Rx software, particularly the powerful processor, rich graphics and large storage capacity."

Physicians aren't the only ones who have downloaded the application. According to Epocrates, hundreds of thousands of other health care professionals and even consumers have downloaded the application.

What about you? We'd love to hear from you. Have you downloaded Epocrates? If so, how are you using it in your office or facility? Send us your testamonials!

Right now, Epocrates is only available for the iPhone or iPod Touch. Epocrates has not said if it is developing a version of the application for other platforms. It can be downloaded from the iPhone Apps Store.