epocrates Celebrates Sizable 2022 Growth, Driven by New Design, Tools, and Guidelines to Improve the Clinician Experience

The #1 rated* medical reference app's redesigned newsfeed now generates average of one million impressions per weekday

WATERTOWN, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--epocrates, an athenahealth, Inc. company that delivers digital clinical decision support to prescribers, today shared key accomplishments from 2022 that enhance the company’s leading position in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Notably, epocrates redesigned its mobile app to further improve the clinician experience, streamlining access to the many tools clinicians rely on at the point of care and beyond. The redesign includes organizing the tools in an intuitive, easy-to-navigate way that features a re-imagined home page, new bottom navigation ribbon, medical news reel, and reorganized reference tools. Since the redesign in May 2022, news views have increased 64% and interaction check usage has increased 59% pointing to major growth in both epocrates’ clinician engagement and usage.

As the nation’s clinician shortage intensifies, the remaining healthcare workforce is busier than ever and facing growing caseloads to keep up with patient demand. In addition to supporting busy clinicians with a more user-friendly mobile app, epocrates also released several updates to its decision support tools and enhanced content in 2022. This was to enable clinicians to stay up to date on the most current information and independent expert guidance, ensuring users have rapid access to the answers they need to make the best decisions at the point of care. One of the most significant tools epocrates launched was Bugs + Drugs, the only mobile solution of its kind to offer clinicians information on geolocalized antibiotic susceptibility patterns in the ambulatory setting with associated drug information to promote optimal antibiotic prescribing. Since its launch in September, epocrates has had more than 140,000 unique users to Bugs + Drugs, and more than 10,000 zip codes have been looked up in the tool across all 50 U.S. states.

Trending infectious disease topics dominated the company’s latest decision tools. Notable updates in 2022 include influenza vaccination, antiviral therapy, and chemoprophylaxis amidst the looming threat of a viral tripledemic of COVID-19, RSV, and flu. Evolving guidance on outbreaks of monkeypox and enterovirus D68 reflect the latest CDC guidance, and advances in HIV therapy are incorporated into Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) based recommendations for initial therapy in antiretroviral-naive adults and children.

Additionally, epocrates uncovered interesting 2022 look-up trends, including that the top three most frequently searched drug-to-drug interactions all involved Paxlovid, paired with Eliquis, atorvastatin, or amlodipine, and the three most frequently searched drugs were Ozempic, Farxiga, and Wegovy. The company also realized notable annual trends in its levels of usage and engagement including¹:

• 18% increase in the number of continuing medical education (CME) credits completed year over year (YoY)
• Average of 25 drug lookups per user per month
• Five percent increase in the number of drug lookups YoY, with 89% looked up via the company’s app and 11% looked up via the company’s website interface
• Four percent increase in total sessions YoY

“With a shrinking healthcare workforce, clinicians are continuously looking for resources to help them save time. Our mission at epocrates is to provide the most accurate, continually researched, and updated clinical content, and I am proud of the important features and decision tools we launched in 2022 that support the clinician experience,” said Diane Bartoli, vice president and general manager, epocrates. “At the same time, marketers are finding it harder than ever before to engage with clinicians, but the momentum we achieved last year has laid the groundwork to support capabilities and enhancements planned for our commercial clients in 2023 to further help them reach clinicians with the right message in the right place.”

For more information about epocrates’ latest features, please visit: https://www.epocrates.com/features.

About epocrates

Since 1998, epocrates, an athenahealth, Inc. company, has served essential, clinical content to more than one million physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals. Centered around unparalleled drug prescribing and safety information, the app provides fast answers and trusted decision support in seconds at the point of care, enabling clinicians to focus on delivering the most effective and personalized patient care. Our Medical Information team is committed to providing accurate, current, unbiased and clinically relevant information, which is why epocrates has been rated as the #1 medical reference app for over a decade. For more information, please visit: www.epocrates.com.

^*DRG Taking the Pulse Study, 2021
¹ All YoY data included represents January 1, 2022-December 31, 2022

Hannah Purviance
epocratesMedia@athenahealth.com
617-402-1661