“Background: Many patients receive health care in different settings. Thus, a limitation of clinical care may be inaccurate medication lists, since data exchange between settings is often lacking and patients do not regularly self-report on changes in their medication. Health care professionals and patients are both interested in utilizing electronic health information. However, opinion is divided as to who should take responsibility for maintaining personal health records. In Sweden, the government has passed a law to enforce and fund a national register of dispensed medications. The register comprises all individuals with dispensed medications (6.4 million individuals, September 2006) and can be accessed by the individual online via “My dispensed medications”. The individual has the right to restrict the accessibility of the information in health care settings.
Objective: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the users’ attitudes towards their access to “My dispensed medications” as part of a new interactive Internet service on prescribed medications.
Method: A password-protected Web survey was conducted among a first group of users of “My dispensed medications”. Data was anonymously collected and analyzed with regard to the usefulness and design of the Web site, the respondents’ willingness to discuss their “My dispensed medications” with others, their reasons for access, and their source of information about the service.
Results: During the study period (January-March, 2007), all 7860 unique site visitors were invited to answer the survey. Invitations were accepted by 2663 individuals, and 1716 responded to the online survey yielding a view rate of 21.8% (1716/7860) and a completion rate of 64.4% (1716/2663). The completeness rate for each question was in the range of 94.9% (1629/1716) to 99.5% (1707/1716). In general, the respondents’ expectations of the usefulness of “My dispensed medications” were high (total median grade 5; Inter Quartile Range [IQR] 3, on a scale 1-6). They were also positive about the design of the Web site (total median grade 5; IQR 1, on a scale 1-6). The high grades were not dependent on age or number of drugs. A majority of the respondents, 60.4% (1037/1716), had learned about “My dispensed medications” from pharmacies. 70.4% (1208/1716) of all respondents said they visited “My dispensed medications” to get control or an overview of their drugs. Getting control was a more common (P < .001) answer for the elderly (age 75 or above), whereas curiosity was more common (P < .001) for the younger age group (18-44 years).
Conclusion: We found that users of the provider-based personal medication record “My dispensed medications” appreciated the access to their record. Since we found that the respondents liked the design of the Web site and perceived that the information was easy to understand, the study provided no reason for system changes. However, a need for more information about the register, and to extend its use, was recognized.”
Article
Montelius E, Åstrand B, Hovstadius Bo, Petersson G, J Med Internet Res 2008;10(4):e35, doi: 10.2196/jmir.1022
Tagged: access, consent, drugs, pharmacist and web
; posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 10:37 am
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“At this week’s opening of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Annual Meeting and Exposition (Atlanta, USA, November 16-20, 2008) Philips Research will announce its new intelligent pill technology “iPill”, targeted at assisting drug development and enabling new therapies for debilitating and life-threatening digestive tract disorders such as Crohn’s disease, colitis and colon cancer.”
Article
Physorg, 11 November 2008
Tagged: devices and drugs
; posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 10:29 am
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““Drugs don’t work in patients who don’t take them.” This quote, by the former Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, M.D, appeared in a New England Journal of Medicine article on drug therapy and adherence.
There are many reasons (cost, inconvenience, forgetfulness, unpleasant side effects) why patients don’t take their medicine. Medication adherence has become an issue of great concern within the health community, especially as we get older as a nation. So in this spirit, Verizon recently launched what it refers to as the Pill Phone — a new technology that allows people to make sure they keep to their medication regimens and help family members keep to theirs.”
Article
Kathryn Brown, Disruptive Women in Healthcare, 30 October 2008
Tagged: cellphone, drugs and medication
; posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
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“A large majority of 365 Internet sites that advertise or sell controlled medications by mail are offering to supply the drugs without a proper prescription, according to a new study. The online trade is stoking the rising abuse of addictive and dangerous prescription drugs, the authors and federal officials say.”
Article
Erik Eckholm, The New York Times, 9 July 2008
Tagged: drugs and web
; posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 10:01 am
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“Its one of the paradoxes of modern medicine in the United States. At the doctors office and the drugstore, we say we want prescription drugs. In fact, we spend more than $200 billion on them every year. Between 1994 and 2005, a period in which the U.S. population increased by only 9 percent, the number of prescriptions patients had filled increased by a whopping 70 percent.”
Article
Wade Roush, xconomy Boston, 24 June 2008
Tagged: drugs and innovation
; posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 7:04 am
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“An estimated 1.5 million drug errors take place each year in the US alone. If we do the math, that means the average number of medication errors made in the hospital is one error, per patient, per day.”
Article
Trisha Torrey, About.com, 23 June 2008
Tagged: drugs, hospitals, medication errors and robot
; posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 8:48 pm
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“Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly relying on signal detection technologies to aid in identifying and managing adverse drug events, says a new report.
According to analysts at the British market research firm Datamonitor, the pharmaceutical industry will see accelerated growth in the uptake of drug safety monitoring technology.
Article
Richard Pizzi, Healthcare IT News, 6 June 2008
Tagged: adverse drug reactions, drugs, information technology, pharmaceutical and safety
; posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
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“Physicians using the Apple iPhone as their mobile device of choice now have another clinical resource at their disposal.
Drugs. com, an online compendium of clinical drug and related health information, has launched a professional edition for the iPhone.
Article
Richard Pizzi, Healthcare IT News, 4 June 2008
Tagged: cellphone and drugs
; posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 9:46 am
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“A trip to the doctor is the start of a conversation that provides the link between our everyday lives and the medical profession. Each day in the UK more than a million conversations take place between doctors and patients. When governments, policy makers and others talk about healthcare, these conversations often fade into the background. But conversations are the foundation for our health, with enormous potential impact.”
Report
Jack Stilgoe, Faizal Farook, Demos, May 2008
Tagged: communication, drugs and health 2.0
; posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
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“When we launched eDrugSearch.com in January 2007, we focused on the core mission of enabling consumers to safely search for low-cost drugs from Canadian and other international pharmacies. We have been successful in getting the word out and growing our site rapidly — attracting more than five million searches in our first year. We’ve done this without advertising, relying on word of mouth.
In February, we expanded our mission in a big way — with the launch of the eDrugSearch.com Community, a social network for prescription drug consumers.”
Article
Matthew Holt, Health 2.0, 5 May 2008
Tagged: drugs, health 2.0 and search
; posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 8:18 am
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“The nation’s first law that requires high-tech tracking devices to help thwart prescription-drug counterfeiters is facing one more hurdle as drug companies, wholesalers and pharmacies push for a two-year delay.”
Article
Julie Appleby, USA Today, 25 March 2008
Tagged: devices, drugs, pharmaceutical and rfid
; posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
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“By popular demand, the Epocrates drug-reference database will soon be among the first batch of non-Apple software available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.”
Article
Neil Versel, Digital Healthcare & Productivity, 11 March 2008
Tagged: cellphone and drugs
; posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
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“Now you need not have to worry about forgetting to take your pills, as researchers have designed a sensor necklace that ensures you don’t miss your doses.”
Article
New Kerala, 6 March 2008
Tagged: devices, drugs, sensors and wireless
; posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
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“Clinical decision support specialist, First DataBank Europe (FDBE) has released live condition checking content within its drug knowledge base, the Multilex Drug Data File (Multilex DDF).
The new content supports the SNOMED CT based condition checking functionality, released in July 2006, and means that patient data recorded using SNOMED CT codes can be used within a Multilex DDF condition check.”
Article
eHealth Insider, 1 February 2008
Tagged: decision support, drugs and SNOMED
; posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 8:51 pm
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“Patients could be saved millions of trips to their GP under a new scheme that has the potential to revolutionise the system of prescribing medicines.
The electronic transfer of repeat prescriptions between general practices and pharmacies is currently being rolled out across the UK, in a bid to streamline the system and make it faster and more convenient for patients - as well as cutting down on prescription errors.”
Article
Medical News Today, 30 December 2007
Tagged: drugs, e prescribing and elderly
; posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
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“A new computational method that searches an enormous database of protein structures could allow researchers to predict a drug’s potential side effects without breaking out a single test tube. The technique, developed by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), could also be applied to existing drugs to explain known side effects or to identify additional uses.”
Article
Jocelyn Rice, MIT Review, 17 December 2007
Tagged: drugs
; posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 8:56 am
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“Design: Biomedical literature and clinical narratives from the patient record were mined to gather knowledge about disease-drug associations. Two NLP systems, BioMedLEE and MedLEE, were applied to Medline articles and discharge summaries, respectively. Disease and drug entities were identified using the NLP systems in addition to MeSH annotations for the Medline articles. Focusing on eight iseases, co-occurrence statistics were applied to compute and evaluate the strength of association between each disease and relevant drugs.
Conclusion: This paper presents a method for acquiring disease-specific knowledge and a feasibility study of the method. The method is based on applying a combination of NLP and statistical techniques to both biomedical and clinical documents. The approach enabled extraction of knowledge about the drugs clinicians are using for patients with specific diseases based on the patient record, while it is also acquired knowledge of drugs frequently involved in controlled trials for those same diseases. In comparing the disease-drug associations, we found the results to be appropriate: the two text sources contained consistent as well as complementary knowledge, and manual review of the top five disease-drug associations by a medical expert supported their correctness across the diseases.”
Abstract
Elizabeth S. Chen, George Hripcsak, Hua Xu, Marianthi Markatou, and Carol Friedman, J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2008;15:87-98. DOI 10.1197/jamia.M2401
Tagged: drugs and narrative
; posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 11:00 am
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“Can the pharmaceutical industry avoid another Vioxx? The painkiller was pulled from the market in 2004 when it became clear that it increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Tens of thousands of people sued, forcing its manufacturer, Merck, to pay $4.85 billion to settle the cases. If there were a way of spotting side effects missed by clinical trials it would save lives and money.”
Abstract
Jim Giles, New Scientist Magazine issue 2633, 8 December 2007
Tagged: drugs
; posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
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“The eHealth Initiative Foundation has launched a collaborative research effort designed to improve drug safety for patients through the use of information technology.”
Article
Molly Merrill, Healthcare IT News, 29 November 2007
Tagged: drugs, information technology and safety
; posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
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“Laptop-attached ultrasound units that produce startlingly clear internal images for five dollars in the field. Organs that re-generate inside scaffolds. Drugs tailored to an individuals biology. Micro-images of cancerous cells lit up by bio-chemical markers. Decision support tools that scan the physiological values in electronic health records for patterns too complex to be detected by an unaided clinician.”
Article
Brian Klepper, The Health Care Blog, 15 october 2007
Tagged: drugs, health 2.0, information technology and rural
; posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 12:20 am
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At health-care summit, Lilly chief calling for ‘true information revolution’
“Millions of patients. Thousands of drugs. Countless doctors, hospitals, clinics and procedures. Billions of pieces of medical data.
It all adds up to a fragmented U.S. health-care system that needs to move more quickly into the computer age, says the top executive at Indianapolis drug maker Eli Lilly and Co.”
Article
John Russell, Indianapolis Star, 2 October 2007
Tagged: drugs, efficiency, emr, Health Information Exchange and safety
; posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 7:03 pm
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“IBM today announced a series of emerging innovations that have the potential to dramatically shift the landscape of healthcare and life sciences solutions for patients, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and the general public. These innovations are based on new research breakthroughs and emerging technologies from IBM’s Labs as well as through a legacy of storage, server and technology innovation and deep roots in the healthcare industry.”
Article
CNN Money, 24 September 2007
Tagged: diagnose, drugs, Health Information Exchange, Health Information Technology, interoperability, pandemics and standards
; posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 8:44 am
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“Magazines and newspapers across the country are building up their Web offerings in health and fitness as their specialized advertising dollars and readers migrate online at a particularly rapid pace.”
Article
Steve Lohr, The New York Times, 17 September 2007
Tagged: drugs, health information and web
; posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
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“University of Miami researchers will scour the medical files of 11 million Humana Inc. patients looking for dangerous effects from prescription drugs, under a new project unveiled Wednesday.”
Article
Bob LaMendola, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 23 August 2007
Tagged: drugs and secondary data use
; posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 5:16 pm
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