Pepid has some really good apps for medical professionals, the ones I’m familiar with are aimed at ER docs. They’re good.
Pepid is so good I gave them an unsolicited endorsement in 2007:
Yeah, that sounds very generic, so let me tell you about when I decided to convert from the free (14 day) trial and spend the bucks. A patient presents feeling frankly terrible and with a diffuse vasculitic rash. Very early in the history it’s determined the patient has been taking quite a lot more methotrexate than intended (mixup, not sure why) so I tried out my new Pepid: ‘methotrexate’ brings up not just the drug, but throws me a lifeline: ‘overdose’ is on the front-page drop down menu. I clicked on that, and it took me to the antidote (Leucovorin AD, liquid folate, which I didn’t remember), and then, tells me it’s dosed based on body surface area, then offers a calculator, all in serial – sequential clicks. Amazing, and terrific.
That paragraph contains their Achilles heel: The Bucks. It’s never been cheap, and it’s not getting cheaper.
This year I elected to forgo renewing Pepid. It’s not that it’s not good (it is), it’s that the difference between the excellent free medical apps (Epocrates) (Medscape) plus now ubiquitous online resources (UpToDate supplied by my Corporate Overlords) minus their requested yearly rate for my iPhone ($264/year) wasn’t worth it. That’s just for the iPhone app, if you wan their iPad app you’ll have to buy that separately. Really, for only $264 they can’t just throw in the iPad app.
Imagine if you were to accidentally order the 3 year plan: $694. Sticker shock. Wow. So, if you asked them for a downgrade to the one year of the program, they’d do that, right? Sucker…
That’s right. My friend Rick (A terrific Physician Executive, Coach and pioneering blogger) accidentally clicked the 3 year button, immediately asked for a downgrade, and was told no. Pepid was more interested in his money than his loyalty or the customer experience.
Beware: Pepid screwed this doctor. Are you feeling lucky?
Publishers of all sorts are not understanding what a reasonable charge should be for these services, or even ebooks. I can’t even recall how many offers I run across for some resource costing hundreds of dollars a year. Really? I was a free beta user of Elsevier’s Clinical Key, but found it was rather clunky and certainly wasn’t worth paying for.
Like you, we have UpToDate at our institution, and I have to say it’s pretty good, since it gives me a lot of choices for info quickly and the stuff they have is good.