Home health remedies Delivering accurate drug information to point of care, part II

Delivering accurate drug information to point of care, part II

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Posted on March 31st, 2021 by in Medical Information

Part 2: The challenges that can restrict access to the latest and most accurate information on medications

Healthcare professionals are the ones tasked with safely prescribing, dispensing and managing medications. As mentioned in part 1 of this series, that puts them in the position of needing to know — or being able to quickly check — the latest information about a huge number of new and existing medical products.

A layperson might
imagine that it is simply a case of performing a few straightforward searches
for the medical product label online. In reality, some of the essential
insights may not be found in the product label. An exhaustive search of the
available literature would be the only way to answer all possible questions.

Here, we will look at
some of the barriers that healthcare professionals encounter when attempting to
access the most current and accurate medical information.

As noted previously, pharmaceutical
manufacturers have a customer-facing capability whose primary purpose is to
support the safe and effective use of company products by providing timely,
scientifically balanced, evidence-based information. These medical information
teams serve an important role within medical affairs. They are composed of
healthcare professionals, including pharmacists, nurses and doctors, and they are
an incredible resource.

However, awareness is
an issue. As explained in the previous post, 40% of healthcare professionals
are not aware that pharmaceutical manufacturers have such dedicated departments
that would provide answers about medication, including information not found in
the readily available prescribing information. Healthcare professionals need to
know that they can ask, and then they need to know who to ask.

Some pharmaceutical
companies offer self-service websites with search engines for the medical
information curated by those teams. However, these can vary widely from company
to company. For example, the words entered into the search may not mean the
same thing to every search engine. Some may understand that a person entering “analgesic” could be
interested in documents that are not tagged (or indexed) with “analgesic” but are
tagged with “NSAID” or “paracetamol” – but others may not understand or use
synonyms or related terms in their application. This gets even more complicated
when we consider brand and generic names for medications. Will the search
engine understand that when you enter “gabapentin,” you’re also interested in
“Neurontin” and “Neurostil”? Unfortunately,
this difference in functionality is not always clear to the healthcare professional
requesting the information.

Another issue are time
constraints. They’re a familiar enemy to most of us, but when you’re dealing
with patients, they take on a particular edge. At the point-of-care, quick and
accurate decisions are expected — and essential. It’s one thing if a treatment
regime can be planned in advance of seeing a patient. It’s quite another if
they’re waiting for help in the ER, general practitioner’s office or pharmacy.
Taking the time to use multiple pharmaceutical company search engines and
possibly the literature is a luxury — never mind the idea of waiting for
responses from more than one pharmaceutical manufacturer’s medical information
team and then determining the best course of action.

Finally, there is the
issue of information quality: if the search is performed using a source that is
not complete or up to date, the results may be misleading. New information
emerges about existing and new medical products all the time. High-quality
resources must be well curated, current, evidence-based, comprehensive, and
provide information in a structured and contextualized manner.

This is the goal of the Pharma Collaboration for Transparent Medical Information™ (phactMI), a 501(c)(6) that seeks to improve the lives of patients through the safe and effective use of medicines.

phactMI.org currently
enables searches of over 3,000 prescribing information product labels and
associated medical information responses in a consolidated resource that is
curated to be up to date and easy to search.

In the next post, we
will look in more detail as well as what phactMI provides to the healthcare community.

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