Epocrates is the drug reference clinicians keep open in the other hand.

Epocrates leads with a drug monograph database that covers prescription, OTC, and alternative therapies, each entry organised the way clinicians scan one: adult and paediatric dosing first, then adjustments for renal and hepatic impairment, contraindications, black-box warnings, mechanism, pharmacokinetics, and a price-and-formulary line at the bottom. The interaction checker takes up to thirty drugs at once and grades each pairing by severity, which is the field most users actually open the app for.

The Pill ID tool indexes tablet and capsule imprints by colour, shape, and scoring — drop in the imprint code from a loose pill and you get back a candidate list with the dosage form attached. Other utilities include MedMath calculators (creatinine clearance, MAP, BMI, opioid conversions), an ICD-10 lookup, and a guidelines library that surfaces society recommendations for common acute presentations.

The free tier carries most of that. Epocrates Plus, billed annually, adds disease monographs, lab and infectious-disease references, CME tracking, and an alternative-medications database. A clinician account is required to install at all — Athenahealth verifies NPI or trainee status during sign-up.

The app stays out of the way. Search is keyboard-first, monographs open instantly even offline once cached, and the interaction checker lets you stack medications in the order they're charted rather than alphabetically. After twenty-five years on the App Store, the team has clearly stopped redesigning for its own sake.

Athenahealth has also kept the core formulary free, which matters in a category where most competitors now gate basic dosing behind a subscription. For a resident or a hospitalist who just needs to confirm a renal dose between rooms, that's the entire pitch.

The Plus paywall keeps moving. Features that lived in the free tier a decade ago — alternative medicines, some of the disease content, parts of the lab reference — have migrated behind the subscription, and the upgrade prompts inside monographs are persistent enough that some App Store reviewers now describe the free experience as adware-adjacent. Athenahealth would do well to draw a clearer line and stop moving it.

The iPad layout still treats the larger canvas as a stretched phone view, with two-pane reading nowhere to be found, and dark mode rendering inside monographs occasionally leaves table cells unreadable. Sync between devices is account-based but slower than it should be — switch from iPhone to iPad mid-shift and the recently-viewed list takes a beat to catch up.

If you prescribe, dispense, or counsel on medications and you carry an iPhone, Epocrates is still the install. The free tier is enough for the routine dosing-and-interactions work that fills a clinical day; the Plus subscription is worth comparing against UpToDate or Lexicomp before you commit. The pill identifier alone justifies the install for anyone who has ever fished a loose tablet out of a patient's pillbox.