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There’s an interesting article in the July 2005 Business 2.0 entitled "Helping Doctors Go Digital."
It talks about an application that runs on Palm and Pocket PC devices call Epocrates Essentials (1 in every 4 docs subscribes to it). It is free for basic drug data and starts at $60 a year for information like disease profiles and diagnostics.
This sounds like a perfect partner for C-Tools down the line.
This article is interesting in many ways! I was impressed with the the use of viral marketing to reach physicians – word of mouth – which comes across to doctors as having the most cred. Loevner says Epocrates spent almost no money to get 470,000 healthcare workers on board.
The plan is to have the costs covered now by advertising – which I thought might be off-putting to physicians, but the article quotes one saying that sponsored alerts are no different than ads in medical journals.
Where it gets more interesting is Epocrates can match doctor’s prescribing histories with the ads they have seen and measure response with “unprecedented precision. Lovener claims that Epocrates ads targeted by medical specialty can boost a drug’s market share as much as 7 percent. No wonder the world’s top 10 pharmaceutical companies are clients.”
Last note to ponder is that Loevner says Epocrates might roll out features such as clinical trial recruitment – maybe the time is now to look at Epocrates and C-Tools with this added feature.