The U.S. National Library Medicine is responsible for two free web drug-related databases that are intended to be used by both consumers and healthcare professionals. Provided as a public service, these databases do not include any pharmaceutical company advertisements and are not marketing tools. Both resources also provide application development support, making the content easily available to computer programers/developers.

1. Pillbox

“The Pillbox website was developed to aid in the identification of unknown pills (oral solid dosage form medications). It combines images of pills with appearance and other information to enable users to visually search for and identify oral solid dosage form medications.” Among other identifiers, Pillbox can even be searched by pill imprint, shape, and color.

Pillbox is one of the largest free databases of prescription and over-the-counter drug information and images, combining data from pharmaceutical companies, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). As of 10/01/19, it includes 8,781 pill images, 33,255 products, and 67,365 records.

2. DailyMed

DailyMed provides high quality information about marketed drugs, both human and animal drugs, via their FDA labels (package inserts). It provides health information providers and the public with a standard, comprehensive, and up-to-date resource of medication content and labeling as found in medication package inserts.

This website contains 112,954 drug listings as submitted to the FDA. (Note: This is not a complete listing of labels for approved prescription drugs.) The website also includes a label archives search where previous versions of labels can be found.

To learn more about these tools or other drug-related databases (like Micromedex or LexiComp Online) provided via the MSK Library, feel free to Ask Us!