Clinical Decision Support Tools: Performance of Personal Digital Assistant versus Online Drug Information Databases

Study Objectives. To evaluate personal digital assistant (PDA) drug information databases used to support clinical decision‐making, and to compare the performance of PDA databases with their online versions. Design. Prospective evaluation with descriptive analysis. Methods. Five drug information databases available for PDAs and online were evaluated according to their scope (inclusion of correct answers), completeness (on a 3‐point scale), and ease of use; 158 question‐answer pairs across 15 weighted categories of drug information essential to health care professionals were used to evaluate these databases. An overall composite score integrating these three measures was then calculated. Scores for the PDA databases and for each PDA‐online pair were compared. Results. Among the PDA databases, composite rankings, from highest to lowest, were as follows: Lexi‐Drugs, Clinical Pharmacology OnHand, Epocrates Rx Pro, mobileMicromedex (now called Thomson Clinical Xpert), and Epocrates Rx free version. When we compared database pairs, online databases that had greater scope than their PDA counterparts were Clinical Pharmacology (137 vs 100 answers, p