Four AI-Enhanced Mobile Apps to Assist Primary Care Physicians

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can save physicians time in several practical ways, including drafting prior authorization requests, explaining test results in more patient-friendly language, and serving as a scribe.¹ But the burgeoning number of AI-enhanced apps is difficult to sort through, and choosing the best tool for the task can be even more daunting. It’s important to choose wisely because AI programs are only as good as the data they’re trained on and are known to sometimes create false information. Programmers call these “hallucinations,” and they can include creating citations for articles that don’t exist.²

This article attempts to guide physicians to relatively reliable and trustworthy tools by reviewing four medical apps using FPM’s “SPPACES” criteria. Each of them is a five-star app in my opinion, but for more context I’ve included their App Store (Apple) and Google Play (Android) user ratings as of May 30, 2025. Ratings are based on a scale of 1–5, with five being the best.

Pathway is a useful resource for well-researched, peer-reviewed, evidence-based clinical recommendations. The paid version can also help with decision support for differentials and management.

Source: Pathway Medical, Inc.

Platforms available: Android 6.0 and up; iOS 15.6 and up for iPhone and iPad.

Pertinence to primary care practice: Practicing family medicine requires a wide breadth of clinical knowledge that is always changing and growing. Pathway enables physicians to get rapid evidence-based answers while also offering CME (in the paid version).

The home screen is user-friendly and largely free of clutter, with the AI search bar prominently featured. It includes sample queries such as “What’s new?” “Manage patient,” “Find differential,” and “Find dose.” You can listen to the responses, copy them, or share them (even with non-Pathway users). At the end of each response, the program poses three potential follow-up questions. When prompted, Pathway can display answers in tables or even compare and contrast various guidelines in seconds.

The “Updates” page includes notable studies and disease guidelines. If the user lacks a specific question, they can go to the “Search” page and choose between “Diseases,” “Drugs,” “Studies,” “Pathways,” “Findings,” “Calculators,” and “Specialties.” (Note that each of those pages takes a few seconds to load.)

Pathway has limitations, particularly in the free version. The static “Pathways” pages remain useful, but the company is no longer updating them. Instead, the app directs users to utilize Pathway AI, which limits “deep searches” to one per day for non-paying users (basic searches appear to be unlimited but draw from fewer sources). The “Findings” pages include signs, symptoms, and abnormal labs, but only paid subscribers can see all causes (common, less common, uncommon, and pharmacological); users without a subscription can primarily view the more common causes.

Authoritativeness/accuracy/currency of information: Pathway utilizes guidelines from 39 specialties covering more than one million clinical topics including more than 1,000 diseases. Per the company’s editorial policy, all of its guidelines must be published in a peer-reviewed journal and produced by a recognized medical specialty association, professional medical society, or recognized group of medical experts. Pathway AI responses often cite high-quality primary sources such as meta-analyses and randomized controlled trials, including systematic reviews from the Cochrane Library and appropriate use recommendations from Choosing Wisely and the American College of Radiology.³ Pathway tries to incorporate new guidelines within one month of their publication. According to the company, its program surpassed all other specialized medical AI apps in accuracy on the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination, scoring 96%.⁴

Cost: Free for the basic version; $314.99 per year for Pathway Plus, which allows unlimited AI queries, CME redemption, a differential diagnosis tool, ad-free reading, and likelihood ratios.

Ease of use: Evidence-based guideline summaries are listed in bullet-point format. The Pathway page algorithm interface is easy to follow and use at the point of care. All content is downloaded onto the device (377.9 MB). Searches may take up to 20 seconds but return with more treatment options and even graphical representations of information. Content within the app is available in English only.

Sponsor: No outside funding from the pharmaceutical industry. Investors include Yamaha Motor Sports, Verge, Amplify Capital, BoxOne, Formentera Capital, Panache Ventures, and some individuals.

Rating: 4.8 with more than 1,300 App Store ratings; 4.3 with more than 380 Google Play ratings.

Pathway is one of the best evidence-based resources for creating differentials and researching clinical questions without using a database such as PubMed.

Doximity is a news app, social network for clinicians, HIPAA-compliant fax machine, and secure telemedicine tool for patient video and telephone calls. The company has existed for 15 years, but it has recently added AI features that can help with administrative tasks.

Source: Doximity

Platforms available: Android 9 and up; iOS 17.0 and up for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

Pertinence to primary care practice: Doximity’s HIPAA-compliant AI assistant can help write SOAP notes, create patient education handouts, and draft prior authorization requests (and responses to payers’ requests) in just a few seconds. You can copy/paste these responses or email them directly from the app. The AI bot’s answers are adequate for knowledge-based questions and patient education but are not nuanced or up-to-date enough to help guide clinical decisions. However, the images it retrieves are useful for showing to patients or finding an algorithm quickly.

Doximity’s non-AI features remain useful as well. The app can display your outgoing calls to patients as your office number — leaving no fear of accidentally providing access to your cell phone number. You can integrate it into Epic Haiku and AMiON scheduling apps, making it ideal for doing telemedicine. Also, the HIPAA-compliant faxing capability allows users to receive, sign, date, annotate, and send faxes all within the app — no paper needed.

Lastly, Doximity’s “Careers” tab includes job postings for locum tenens, full-time, part-time, and telemedicine opportunities, salary insights by specialty and location, median home prices in the search area, and paid surveys. It also has a “Residency Navigator” that approximately 90% of fourth-year medical students use to help decide where to apply to residencies, according to the company.

Authoritativeness/accuracy/currency of information: Doximity’s AI is GPT-4o, so its built-in knowledge base only includes information up to October 2023. Its sources are less evidence-based than Pathway’s and may include things like Health magazine and clinic websites unless you restrict it to certain sources by using more specific prompts.

Cost: Free.

Ease of use: The app is relatively user-friendly but is available in English only.

Sponsors: Corporate partners include AMiON, U.S. News & World Report, and Press Ganey. Includes pharmaceutical advertising.

Rating: 4.8 with more than 180,000 App Store ratings; 4.7 with more than 7,000 Google Play ratings.

Doximity is an app that every physician should consider using to connect with other physicians or to provide patient education handouts. Its AI features, while not adequate for clinical assistance, are useful for administrative tasks.

The Medscape app is a comprehensive resource for medications, diseases, and medical calculators. It now hosts one of the fastest and most reliable AI search engines to help users access, filter, and sort all that information efficiently.

Source: WebMD LLC

Platforms available: Android 9 and up; iOS 16.0 and up for iPhone and iPad; macOS 13.0 and up and Apple M1 chip and up for Mac computer.

Pertinence to primary care practice: The app’s database for clinicians includes information about more than 8,500 prescription medications, over-the-counter-drugs, and herbal supplements, as well as 6,200 reference articles spanning 30 specialties. Its drug interaction checker can compare prescription medications, herbals, or foods simultaneously.

The app provides educational material through quizzes, step-by-step procedural articles, podcasts, live events, and webinars about thousands of different topics. Many of these activities include free CME credit. The app also has a newsfeed that tracks Food and Drug Administration approvals, new clinical trial data, and need-to-know medical meeting presentations.

The app features a “Pill Identifier” that is searchable by imprint, shape, color, form, and scoring. It also includes a free, HIPAA-compliant scribe physicians can use to speed up their documentation; however, all recordings are deleted after 72 hours.

Authoritativeness/accuracy/currency of information: Medscape is a well-regarded medical resource, but it accumulated so much information over time that it became difficult to find what you were looking for quickly. The company solved this problem by incorporating an AI search tool that generates responses based on all available Medscape reference content. The app was developed with the help of physicians, academics, and pharmacists and relies on the medication database RxList and pricing database WebMDRx.

Cost: Free.

Ease of use: Finding information about dosing, interactions, side effects, warnings, use during pregnancy, formularies, pricing, and administration is quick and easy. Its AI searches are the fastest among the apps mentioned in this article while also being concise and accurate. The app is available in English only.

Sponsor: WebMD LLC. Includes pharmaceutical advertising.

Rating: 3.6 with more than 1,300 App Store ratings; 3.9 with more than 64,000 Google Play ratings.

Medscape is my go-to app for finding an answer to a medication question, learning more about a topic in a multimodal way, or identifying an unknown pill.

This app provides answers to just about any question you may have, using a variety of resources.

Source: Perplexity AI Inc.

Platforms available: Android 8.0 and up; iOS 16.0 and up for iPhone and iPad.

Pertinence to primary care practice: Life as a primary care physician is complicated, given the many competing demands for our time — family, friends, physical/mental well-being, and patient care. Perplexity can help with a wide variety of tasks in your professional or personal life: analyze an Excel spreadsheet, create a call schedule, provide a differential diagnosis for onychorrhexis, identify roadblocks and solutions for a new quality improvement project, summarize a research article, write a wedding speech, create a meal plan for a patient who only knows how to use a microwave but needs to follow a Mediterranean and low-residue diet after getting diverticulitis, create a birthday party invitation, and brainstorm gift ideas for your 10-year-old nephew. The list goes on and on.

What sets Perplexity apart from other AI chatbots is that you can narrow searches to specific content types. Both the paid and free versions allow the user to switch the focus from “All” (search the entire internet), “Academic” (search only published academic papers), “Writing” (generate text or chat without searching), “Math” (solve equations and find numerical answers), “Video” (discover and watch videos), and “Social” (search for discussions and opinions). According to the company, the “Pro” (paid) version includes 10 times as many citations in its answers (however, the free version allows three Pro searches per day). The paid version also allows users to upload unlimited files (e.g., an Excel spreadsheet you want to analyze), while the free version limits uploads to three files per day.

Authoritativeness/accuracy/currency of information: Perplexity combines a range of AI software. By switching between these tools and sources in this one app, users can accomplish all their tasks and have a record of what they did in one spot. In its responses, all sources are cited.

However, it has issues with accuracy. When performing a literature review, Perplexity found 18 more sources than ChatGPT, but only 24 of the 132 total articles were discovered by two independent reviewers.⁵ Perplexity also performed worse than other large language models (LLMs) for providing advice on management of avulsed teeth in pediatric dentistry (67.3% accuracy) and creating a differential for common neuro-surgical diagnoses (40% accuracy).^6,7

Cost: Free for the basic version; $20 per month for Perplexity Pro.

Ease of use: Users can ask Perplexity questions with voice or text and can usually get desired responses with little to no prompting expertise. The basic version is nearly as fast as Medscape. The Pro version nearly doubles the response time but provides significantly more information from significantly more resources. Unlike the other apps, this one is available in a number of languages in addition to English: Croatian, Czech, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, and Spanish.

Sponsor: Perplexity is a startup that has yet to go public, and its full list of funders is unknown. Some of its most prominent known investors include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, computer chip manufacturer Nvidia, and Japan’s SoftBank Group.⁸

Rating: 4.9 with more than 179,000 App Store ratings; 4.7 with more than 718,000 Google Play ratings.

Perplexity is not strictly a medical app. It’s more of a general productivity app. As such, it’s useful for obtaining quick answers from various sources to many of life’s questions, but its breadth of sources (even when restricting it to “Academic” texts) leads to accuracy issues that make it less suitable than other apps for clinical uses.

Because we’re all busy family physicians, here’s the tl;dr (“too long; didn’t read”) version: For comprehensive responses, differential diagnoses, and decision support, I use Pathway; for the quickest answers or multimodal learning options, I use Medscape; for creating patient education materials, I use Doximity’s writing assistant; and for research exploration inside or outside of medicine, I start with Perplexity. But given the pace at which AI technology is advancing, the best tool for each application may change from month to month, so figure out what works for you and be flexible.

Finally, let me offer a couple more notes of caution. First, not all of these tools are HIPAA-compliant, so be careful about where you enter personal health information. Second, while these apps can help, they’re no substitute for a physician’s judgment. In fact, each of the aforementioned tools note that the information they provide does not serve as a medical opinion and should be discussed with and verified by a physician. So check their output before you put it into practice.