LexiDrugs
The most popular application for physicians on PDAs is some sort of pharmacopoeia. For the PocketProf project, we have chosen LexiDrugs because of better support for Canadian names, and because it works well on both the PocketPC and on the Palm OS.
It is part of suite of medical tools from Skyscape and is quite well integrated with these other components.
Here are a few tips on how to get best use out of LexiDrugs and its cousins, which share many of the same navigation features.
 | Index |
| SmartTabs |
| History |
| Link |
| Annotations |
| LexiDrugs vs. other pharmacopoieas |
Index
When you first launch LexiDrugs, you will be presented with this opening screen. (If you have not registered your copy then you may get a nag screen first.) The second icon from the left is the Index button - click on this to search the index for the drug.
You can now type in part of the name and click on it when it appears.
The opening screen for each drug starts with the US trade names. For many drugs, the Canadian names are also listed. (ePocrates does not and has little intention of supporting Canadian drug names - they have said for two years that they will implement this but it is clearly not part of their business plan.)
SmartTabs
You will see some tabs down the right side of the screen - this allows you to jump quickly to various sections on each drug. As you can see, these are not very readable - you can adjust the appearance of these by widening them a small amount but it does not take long to figure them out.
The most useful tabs are bold in the following:
| U.S. Brand Names |
| Use |
| Usual Dosage |
| Drug Interactions |
| Warnings/Precautions |
| Contraindications |
| Pregnancy Risk Factor |
| Dosage Forms |
| Therapeutic Category |
| Adverse Reactions |
| Mechanism of Action |
| Overdosage/Toxicology |
| Administration |
| Restrictions |
| Test Data |
| Canadian Brand Names |
If you find the Tab names to be confusing and ambiguous, you can change them, with Edit | SmartTabs...with this, you can rename the tabs to something you find more intuitive and change the order in which the tabs appear. (eg. move Canadian names near the top). This takes a bit of fiddling around and will not be worth it for everyone, but does allow some flexibility in customisation.
History
The icon in the middle with the small red 'h' is for History.
This allows you to go back quickly to previous sections that you have browsed.
Link
The next icon called Link allows you to link to other applications in the Skyscape suite eg. Griffith's 5 Minute Clinical Consult.
Link will take you to the relevant section of each tool - this can be very useful. Try it to see how it works - not hard to figure out.
Annotations
The last two icons on the right are for annotations.
You can type in some short notes of your own about each entry in LexiDrugs. Just click the Notes icon again to save your annotations. Next time you come back to that entry, you can quickly bring up your own stuff.
The icon just to the right lights up when you are in Annotation mode, allowing you to dictate a short voice note about this entry! It is stored with the entry.
LexiDrugs vs the Rest
As mentioned above, we have chosen Skyscape products for various reasons: better coverage of Canadian drug names, cross-platform similarity, depth of detail.
On the Palm OS platform, the ePocrates pharmacopoeia has gathered quite a following for various reasons. To its advantage, it is free and it is easy to install on the Palm/Visor. However, it is not available for the PocketPC - similar to the situation for support of Canadian brand names, the company has been promising support for platforms other than Palm for over two years but does not really appear to be interested in doing this.
We have other concerns about the business model of ePocrates. While it is free, many users do not realise that it is also a form of spyware - that is, the company is regularly gathering information about your PDA usage. This is buried in the small print of the agreement. Each time you log on to the ePocrates server for a weekly drug update, it is also downloading usage data from your machine. (How many of the drugs that you use change weekly anyway?)
There is also the impression that this is similar to the Netscape marketing model - give away your browser and make money selling server software. ePocrates does offer a much broader range of services but there is hot competition in this arena. We question how viable this business model is in the long run.
There are two other pharmacopoeias out there: the Physician Drug Handbook and the Tarascon Pharmacopoeia - we have found these do not support Canadian brand names well. However, some users may prefer their interface.