To reach docs that may not have a laptop at the ready when medical information is needed, Elsevier optimized its MD Consult service for BlackBerrys, iPhones and smartphones.

MD Consult Mobile allows docs to search medical reference books, journals and Elsevier’s The Clinics of North America online resource, as well as patient education handouts, drug information and other materials.

Elsevier partnered with tech firm CIBER to develop the application—available free of charge to traditional MD Consult subscribers—and hopes the Elsevier brand and content will help to differentiate the tool from similar offerings.

“MD Consult Mobile…does rely on the unique value of the authoritative content included in [the original] MD Consult,” said Michael Takats, VP, general manager, MD Consult. “The optimization of this content for the small screen makes accessing that information easier than ever, and closer to the point-of-care,” said Takats, adding that a user’s subscription “could potentially include up to almost 500 [medical text] books…this content has never before been portable.”    

No one would want to read through an entire textbook, or whole sections for that matter, on an iPhone, but having that reference available to be combed via digital search lets physicians access highly specific information more quickly than flipping through the pages of a book. Merck recently put its Merck Manual—weighing in at over 2,500 pages—into a smartphone application.

Though MD Consult Mobile will not contain the CME offering found on the desktop version of MD Consult, everything else will be available on the app. According to Elsevier’s data, nearly 1.5 million physicians query the MD Consult database each month, while the service is used by “more than 1,900 healthcare organizations, including 95% of US medical schools.”