Posts Tagged ‘Davis Drug Guide’

Which Davis Drug Guide for your iPhone?

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Davis’s Drug Guide is produced from Skyscape in the name of DrDrugs implying the phycisians version of it. The latest and most up to date copy is now available native on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

We’ve talked about Davis’s Drug Guide from Unbound Medicine in a previous post, this one from Skyscape is essentially the same and is even sold at the same price which is $50 for the standard edition.

Here’s how it looks;

So we are not going to repeat the merits of this popular Rx reference as we already mentioned that with the Unbound version, However, there are certain differences between the two that we need to examine:

First: the biggest missing feature from Unbound’s version is the built-in drug dose calculators which is fortunately available in the Skyscape’s version.
Second: Unbound’s version provides not only iPhone native version but also web and wireless access to www.drugguide.com which is a great advantage when you want to access it from your desktop or from another mobile device. While in the case of Skyscape you’d have to pay another $50 to get a desktop version.
Third: Skyscape’s SmartLink technology is a an advantage, as we can cross link the drugs to their respective drug interactions or disease information available on the other installed Skyscape titles on the same device. Interlinking is available within the single Unbound Medicine app not across the different apps.
Fourth: UI, navigation, indexing, and search are actually great on both of them and no major difference are noted.

So both have advantages and disadvantages and the choice is individualized. One particular advice here is that if you have many Skyscape titles then it’s wise to go for the Skyscape version for cross linking and if you think you will frequently access it via the desktop or other mobile devices then go for Unbound Medicine’s.

For detailed reviews of both check these links

Unbound Medicine’s Davis Drug Guide

Friday, February 13th, 2009

The FA Davis Drug guide has been one of the most popular drug guides on the PDA. Recently it has been released from Unbound Medicine as a complete solution.

Here’s how the native iPhone app looks;

As with other Unbound Medicine’s new titles you can access the application online by visiting www.drugguide.com on the desktop browser or on your iPhone’s Safari or any device with Internet connection. The web version of the resource also delivers extra resources such as recent FDA alerts. The complete solution can purchased from Unbound Medicine for $50 yearly subscription.

There’s a special nursing version of this pharmacologic reference the Davis Drug Guide for nurses which is also available from Unbound Medicine and is packaged in Nursing Central.

It is interesting how FA Davis gave copyright permissions to four PDA software developers to market this title. Is is available from Medical Wizards, Skyscape, and USBMIS. But their partnership with Unbound Medicine seems to be flourishing as they are now sending visitors to the new Drugguide website developed by Unbound Medicine.

The availability on the iPhone is not exclusive either, as Skyscape has made it available a while ago in what they call it DrDrugs.

There are detailed reviews of this application on Pda4peds check these links:

Here’s the Handango purchase page if you are interested.