DrPEN uses the Internet to give patients resource locations for information specific to their disease or illness. The DrPEN® Directory lists codes that doctors can give patients that will link them directly to the information they need versus sending the patient to a general home page and forcing them to search a web site for needed information. DrPEN has compiled the specific web links through extensive research and each link was reviewed by a physician before it was included in the Directory.

The primary care physician version of DrPEN lists 790 medical conditions commonly seen by primary care physicians and links those medical conditions with ICD-9 codes for insurance reimbursement, as well as easily prescribed web addresses for patient use.

The Cardiology, Orthopedic/Rheumatology and Allergy/Respiratory versions of The DrPEN® Directory provide specialists in those areas with more procedure codes and more specific information and web links for those medical areas.

The PDA and PC versions of The DrPEN® Directoy allow physicians and their staff to have the resource tool stored in their handheld personal digital assistant or on their home or office computer's screen desktop.

DrPEN is the brainchild of Kevin Fergusson, MD, MSHA who wanted to enhance the patient-physician relationship by providing a way that physicians can communicate to their patients on where to find trustworthy information on the Internet. Fergusson not only listed the medical conditions in the Directory, but translated complicated web addresses into simple web links using the DrPEN prefix that makes it easy for physicians to write the address for patients use. For example, a typical web address for abdominal pain would be www.DrPEN.com/789.0 that takes the patient directly to the American Academy of Family Physicians web page on abdominal pain verus giving the patient the Academy’s home page and hope they find the abdominal pain page from there.

In addition to the hundreds of common or specialty medical conditions with their accompanying ICD-9 codes and web links, The DrPEN® Directory contains 195 prevention and guidance records (V-codes), 156 pharmaceutical products with their own web sites, 32 major pharmaceutical manufacturers and 180 health information resources. Fergusson says, "My goal was to put a resource at the physicians fingertips that would provide valuable information to them in terms of ICD-9 codes and referral web addresses for patients, as well as give them a resource that they could distribute to their patients so that they would become better informed and more active participants in their own healthcare."

The DrPEN® Directory is already in use by hundreds of physicians and over 375,000 have been delivered for distribution by a leading pharmaceutical company. Sponsoring organizations can put their business information on the back cover of the booklet or on the opening PDA/PC page for identification purposes.