Windows Phone Thoughts: Examining Epocrates Essentials

Epocrates Tables
Epocrates Tables is the final major reference component of Epocrates Essentials, and provides a wide range of reference tables on matters such as vaccination schedules and ACLS/PALS guidelines, among other things. Epocrates Tables (and Epocrates ID for that matter) are designed to integrate with the content included in Epocrates Rx Pro, thereby enhancing the great content already offered in the latter. All the information is listed in alphabetical order, and like Epocrates Lab and Epocrates ID, it lacks the "Epocrates Find" feature, so you have to resort to the "Look Up" feature if you want to search for a particular piece of information. Tapping on a list entry brings up a page of extended information, which is presented in an easy-to-read, categorised manner. References are also provided in case you wish to know a little more about it.


Figure 14: Epocrates Tables in all its glory.

Epocrates MedTools
The final tab on the Epocrates Essentials interface is Epocrates MedTools, which at the moment, has two components: DocAlert and DocMemo. Both components are an essential part of any physician's life. DocAlert provides medical updates on-the-go by downloading content from the Epocrates server during the AutoUpdate process. When these are available, the program notifies you by providing subject titles of each news. In fact, DocAlert can be likened to an RSS reader, but instead, it takes the hard work out of setting up a server to download off, since it is all automated within AutoUpdate. You can then read up an abstract of the article, as illustrated in Figure 15. If you wanted to read the complete article, all you need to do is tap "Yes" and Epocrates will email you the article after the next AutoUpdate process. This is an intelligent feature, but it does have its negative aspects. The limitation obviously arises in the fact that you are unable to read the full article offline and locally on your device until you next connect to the internet. DocMemo works in a similar manner to the aforementioned "Notes" feature present in the other components of Epocrates Essentials. You can create and read memos by tagging them to specific subjects: Abstracts and Studies, Business, Clinical Trials, Drug Information, Epocrates Information, Guidelines, Personal, POEM, Trivia, Warnings, and Unfiled. Even better, you can edit the subject categories yourself by either renaming pre-existing ones, or adding new ones! Simple!

Epocrates MedTools is also designed to be expandable with its MedMath tools. These include medical calculators (e.g. BMI, creatine clearance, GFR, cardiac risk, and hypertension) which can be downloaded and added to your device. However, it's not all bliss. I would have loved to test these out, yet unfortunately, they are not compatible with the Pocket PC. On the bright side, I was assured by the Epocrates team that an updated version of Epocrates Essentials will be released sometime in the first quarter of 2005, which will extend support for these expandable MedMath tools.


Figure 15: DocAlert constantly offers updated clinical news.