The National Library of Medicine provides three ways to access free, high-quality drug information on mobile devices: the Drug Information Portal, DailyMed and Mobile MedlinePlus.
The Drug Information Portal [1] offers a user-friendly gateway to information about more than 32,000 drugs, providing names, synonyms, descriptions, pharmaceutical categories and structural diagrams. Each record also features numerous links to related information from the NLM, other units of the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. A search in the Drug Information Portal, then, can quickly lead to label information, effects on the liver or breastfeeding, the current status of clinical trials, research articles and more. DailyMed [2] provides comprehensive and up-to-date information about marketed drugs. This includes more than 20,000 structured product labels (SPLs) from the Food and Drug Administration, which are the most recent information submitted by drug companies to the FDA as drug listing information. (Healthcare professionals should note that the data found in DailyMed may not be the final version approved by the FDA; read "About DailyMed [3]" for details.) The mobile version of DailyMed features a simplified design to enable easy search, retrieval and display of SPLs from any Web-enabled mobile device. Users can e-mail SPLs to themselves or to others for later viewing on other platforms.
For consumers, the NLM provides Mobile MedlinePlus [4]. It contains more than 1,000 drug monographs from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, in both English and Spanish. It is updated monthly.
To see all of the mobile websites and apps offered by the NLM, visit the NLM Mobile gallery [5].