An Industry-Wide Evaluation of Drug Information Services
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Drug InJormnrion Journal. Vol. 34, pp. 1139-1148, 2000 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.
Copyright 0 2000 Drug Information Association Inc.
AN INDUSTRY-WIDE EVALUATION OF DRUG INFORMATION SERVICES REBECCA I. DOYLE,PHARMD Drug Information Resident
KARENH. SONG,PHARMD Product Services Manager
ROBERTP. BAKER,PHARMD Director Professional Product Information, Roche Laboratories, Inc., Nutley. New Jersey
This study evaluated the responses of 10 pharmaceutical companies to drug information questions on 10 of their drugs via a telephone survey. For each drug, one question addressed the following topics: general information, drug interaction, dosing in special populations, mechanism of acriodphannacokinetics, stabiliry/srorage, off-label use, and adverse events. Overall satisfaction with the verbal and written responses was 65% and 7096, respectively. Eighty-four percent of the callers found the written responses useful and 66%found the verbal responses useful. Health care professionals were most concerned with finding an answer to their question and less concerned with call handling. The following best practices were identified: using the caller ’s name in conversation, repeating the question for accurate understanding, asking more questions to elicit further information, summarizing the discussion, and sending timely written follow-up responses. An objective for the pharmaceutical industry is to convert written responses to more useful verbal responses. Key Words: Drug information services; Pharmaceutical industry; Best practices; Written response; Verbal response
INTRODUCTION DRUG INFORMATION SERVICES have been described as a resource for providing rapid, accurate, and concise information about drugs (1). With the enormous amount of information available today, it is difficult for health care professionals to assimilate all
Presented in poster form at the DIA 1 I t h Annual “Medical Communications Workshop,” at the Resident’s Poster Session, March 13, 2000, Washington, District of Columbia. Reprint address: Rebecca 1. Doyle, PharmD, 14 Fernbank Avenue. Delmar, NY 12054.
of the knowledge that they need to practice medicine effectively. The increasing number of new drugs available and the speed with which products come to the market require the pharmaceutical industry to provide timely, accurate, and complete information about these products. Historically, the responsibility for storing, retrieving, and evaluating data was delegated to drug information services in academic or institutional facilities (2). However, the pharmaceutical industry has realized its responsibility to maintain a product information database and to disseminate this information as requested. Previous research has often overlooked
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Rebecca I. Doyle, Karen H. Song, and Robert P. Baker
the industry component of drug information. Many studies that include the pharmaceutical industry were conducted retrospectively by a company to evaluate its own services. Stu
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