Epocrates prevents about one adverse drug event (ADE) per week for most physicians who use its mobile clinical software, according to a poll that the company recently conducted. Epocrates surveyed more than 2,000 physicians that use its mobile clinical reference app and 60 percent reported avoiding about one ADE a week and found the app more helpful than EMRs for actionable reference information.

Epocrates claims that more than 33 percent of US physicians use Epocrates, which means it prevents more than 100,000 ADEs each week, according to the company. 

"Having an EMR system is certainly helpful and key to modernizing our healthcare system, but Epocrates is my go-to source during patient visits," Dr. Ronald Hirsch, Illinois-based internist, said in an Epocrates release. "It's always within reach and the up-to-date content includes drugs, diseases and diagnostics."

Some other metrics from the Epocrates survey:

50 percent of Epocrates subscribers report having an EMR in their practice.
61 percent of cardiologists polled use both EMR and Epocrates
58 percent of gastroenterologists use both EMR and Epocrates 

Almost 60 percent of respondents with access to an EMR system said they would be "more likely to act on information they proactively looked up in a mobile clinical reference compared to a pop-up message in their EMR," according to the release.

>40 percent of respondents say Epocrates helped them avoid two or more medical errors per week.
56 percent of primary care physicians surveyed potentially avoided 8 or more ADEs per month.
45 percent of oncologists surveyed potentially avoided 8 or more ADEs per month.

The Epocrates' survey polled 2,075 U.S. physicians across eight medical specialties.

When asked to evaluate five technologies on how well they help avoid medical errors and improve patient safety, respondents ranked the top three as:
Mobile clinical reference software (85 percent)
Electronic prescribing (71 percent)
Electronic medical record systems (65 percent)