App Review: PEPID

Designed specifically for healthcare professionals, PEPID aims to help everyone in the medical scene treat their patients faster. The app is full of information you might need for drugs, pharmaceuticals, and more.

You can download PEPID for free, but if you want the connectivity and updates, you’ll need to pay for it. The Emergency Medicine Suite is $299.95 per year, while Primary Care Plus Ambulatory Care is the same price. The Portable Drug Companion is $144.95 per year. They also offer a Pediatric Emergency Medicine Suite, which is $299.95 per year. Add-ons range from $75 annually for Patient Medication Education to $169 annually for CME.

What It Does

PEPID covers a wide range of functions, but the suites are the most useful choices for most people. These are the emergency medicine suites, which include a wide variety of sections to provide you with information, including:

• Dosing Calculators: Check dosages for thousands of drugs in both weight based and IV drip rate options.
• Medical Calculators: A range of calculators are available, more than 500 that allow you to instantly calculate burn surface areas, where a patient is on the NIH Stroke Scale, the Glasgow Coma Scale, and more.
• Drug Interactions: A special algorithm designed for the app will give you a quick look at whether medications will interact with each other or with illegal drugs and herbal supplements.
• Allergy Checker: It’s possible for a patient to be allergic to certain foods or medications which means they’re likely to experience issues with other meds. This checker will rule out the most common allergy sensitivities.
• Drug Database: Keep over 13,000 drugs on hand, so you can easily check their trade names (in the U.S. and Canada), herbal versions, generic names, and more.
• Pill Identification: Check in a few seconds what a pill is, based on score, shape, or color.
• Lab Manual: You’ll be able to double check normal ranges for 200 common lab results, and look at more in-depth information on each option to help with diagnosis.
• Video Library: There’s a full video library with over 200 videos showing exams and procedures that you can view from the clinical content or in the library.
• Illustrations: View nearly 2,000 images for procedures and treatments that will help you educate your patients.
• Evidence Based Medicine: You’ll find the latest information on clinical inquiries and PURLs.
• ICD-10 Codes: Find the right code in seconds based on clinical content or drug monographs. This makes it much simpler to bill and diagnose.

These are just a handful of the many features offered by PEPID, designed to help physicians and emergency workers move quickly when they are working with a patient. With so much information on hand, it eliminates the need to do more outside research and reduces the chances of drug interactions and poor diagnoses.

Pros and Cons of PEPID

Every app has pros and cons, and PEPID is no exception. This app can be amazing, but it’s also a bit challenging for some people, since it has so much information at the tip of your fingers.

Pros: PEPID is frequently updated, so you can be sure you’re getting all the most recent information on the topic. It includes independent clinical content from a dozen different healthcare associations, which include the American College of Emergency Physicians, the Family Physicians Inquiries Network, and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine. When customers have a suggestion for the app, they often include it in the upcoming update, so the company is quite responsive.

Cons: The downsides to the app include the fact that the search function is not always helpful. It’s difficult to look up medicines by their generic name. Some people dislike the fact that it is a paid app, since it’s certainly not cheap, especially if you want all the bells and whistles. It can also take some time to update the app for newer phone models.

What People Say About PEPID

Of course, the people who are actually using the app are the ones to look to for more information and that’s exactly why you need to read reviews. For the most part, with 4.7 out of five stars, the app is a success. Here’s what PEPID app reviewers have to say:

Juan Valdez Jr. says, “I have had this back up available to me for years and use it frequently to fine tune diagnostic workup as well as therapeutic efforts with certainty that I am doing the best for my patients.”

According to one emergency medicine specialist, the app is very useful. “I use different medical mobile applications in my daily work as a physician. I would like to say that PEPID is the best of them. I found PEPID very nicely developed and very user friendly.”

Other users complained that they were unable to use the app until they’d paid for the online and connected version while others had difficulty with it crashing (this bug seems to be fixed now).

Alternatives to PEPID

There are other medical apps out there designed to provide you with information on saving lives, or that provide access to a drug database, like PEPID. Most of them focus on one particular area, such as pharma, or first aid, and it’s rare to find something that works for all the areas that are covered here.

Epocrates is one of these apps and it provides information to help medical providers stay focused on their patients while collecting the information they need. Over a million healthcare providers use it to keep up with the latest information in diagnostics, safety methods, and treatment information. It’s estimated that doctors save roughly 20 minutes per day by using this app. It starts at $16.99 per month.

Overall, PEPID appears to be an extremely helpful app for anyone who practices medicine. While it’s important to hone your own skills, it’s easy to double check a diagnosis or make sure your patient’s current meds won’t interfere with the new ones. If you’re willing to pay for access to the information, you can have it all right at your fingertips.