POC-IT ABX Guide Named Top 10 Medical Software Tool For PDA

Medical Economics, one of the nation’s leading medical business publication, voted the Johns Hopkins point-of-care antibiotic guide (POC-IT ABX Guide) one of 2008's Top 10 medical software applications for personal digital assistants (PDAs). The Guide was one of three drug guides recommended by the publication’s panelists. Results of their voting appear in the March 7 edition.

The recognition comes on the heels of a licensing agreement with Skyscape, Inc., among the world’s leading providers of mobile medical information by specialty. Skyscape has created a mobile version of the ABX Guide that integrates the Guide with their more than 500 current mobile medical resources and can be used on all major PDA and smartphone platforms including Palm, Pocket PC, BlackBerry, iPhone and Symbian. More than 400,000 physicians, pharmacists, nurses and students worldwide are registered to use the free Web-based version of the ABX Guide (www.hopkins-abxguide.org). The mobile version of the ABX Guide now can be downloaded for $24.95 per year from the Skyscape website (www.skyscape.com). The POC-IT Center and Skyscape are offering the mobile version of the ABX Guide at no cost to Johns Hopkins medical students and house staff.

“Having the mobile version of the Guide available on the full range of mobile devices greatly expands the reach of the ABX Guide in a way we have not been able to do consistently on our own,” says Paul G. Auwaerter, M.D., clinical director of the Johns Hopkins Division of Infectious Diseases and the chief medical officer of the POC-IT Center.

Capitalizing on the popularity of handheld pocket computers, the ABX Guide was launched in 2001 in part to address a growing national concern over antibiotic drug resistance and the inappropriate prescription of drugs. The ABX Guide currently offers information on more than 600 drugs and diseases treated by both specialists and primary care physicians.

Johns Hopkins Point-of-Care Information Technology Guides (POC-IT) are rigorously peer-reviewed electronic clinical databases, providing point-of-care decision-support. The digital ABX Guide gives office- and hospital-based physicians up-to-the-minute accurate information from a reliable academic source, boiling down essential information on drug options and diagnostic criteria that is easily navigated and regularly reviewed by Hopkins experts, who continually update the content to reflect changes in the field.

Unlike other existing digital guides involving infectious diseases, the ABX Guide is heavily annotated and carefully reviewed by academic and clinical specialists at Hopkins, and in some cases other institutions, providing candid opinions about inappropriate medication use. All expert comments are attributed, along with supporting literature citations.

Another feature of the ABX Guide is that emergency alerts, such as FDA recalls, are "pushed" in an instant to all physician users who access the updated database regularly, whether they view the information on the web or on a mobile platform.

Johns Hopkins-accredited continuing medical education programs also are developed by the POC-IT Center and integrated into the Guides’ content on the Web and all mobile devices.

John G. Bartlett, the former chief of the Johns Hopkins Division of Infectious Diseases, championed the development of the ABX Guide and remains its editor-in-chief. Dr. Auwaerter is the Guide’s managing editor.

Joel E. Gallant, M.D., M.P.H. serves as editor-in-chief of the disease-specific POC-IT HIV Guide, which was released on the Web in 2004 and is now available through Skyscape’s mobile network. Through a grant from JHPIEGO, the POC-IT Center is developing an HIV Guide specifically for clinicians in Zambia and is planning to develop more country-specific Guides for low-resource settings.