Drug Safety

Patient Safety & Quality Improvement Assistance for Prescription Drug Therapy

IQH offers quality improvement assistance to all Medicare providers and practitioners, Medicare Advantage and prescription drug plans related to drug safety. The specific components of IQH’s quality improvement drug safety project will focus on clinically significant drug-drug interactions (DDI) and potentially inappropriate medications to individuals 65 years of age or older.

IQH’s drug safety team will identify best practices and educational interventions for practitioners in the effort to reduce the high rate of PIMs and DDIs across Mississippi.

Learn more about drug safety .

For more than 20 years, Aris Global has pioneered the advancement of drug safety, drug safety monitoring, pharmacovigilance, regulatory compliance, medical information and clinical trials management software.

Our solutions are designed to help all life sciences organizations facilitate regulatory compliance, manage risk and improve operational efficiency.

Learn more about Aris Global’s drug safety offerings.

FDA, health care industry, and the medical community collaboration would share data via a national health IT system

CLEVELAND, October 02, 2007 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Sidney Taurel, chairman and chief executive officer, Eli Lilly and Company, in a speech today at the Cleveland Clinic, called on the health care industry, medical community and U.S. government to actively collaborate on a health information technology system that would provide more rapid and useful insights on the effectiveness of medicines while improving drug safety.

His proposal, along with other benefits that would flow from a true healthcare “Information Revolution,” was outlined for an audience of some of the nation’s medical thought-leaders attending Cleveland Clinic’s 2007 Medical Innovations Summit. Taurel was the keynote speaker.

“The use of prescription medicines always will be a matter of balancing benefits and risks,” Taurel said. “Fortunately, systems are now within our grasp to more quickly identify both the true benefits and the full extent of risks associated with medicines in widespread use.”

Read more about Taurel’s drug safety proposal.

Tue Apr 28, 2009 5:21pm EDT

Polypharmacy Analysis Indicates Reduced ER Visits, Fewer Hospitalizations, and
Lower Healthcare Costs
MOUNTLAKE TERRACE, Wash.–(Business Wire)– Emergency room visits and hospitalizations fell among patients who received medication safety education, according to an analysis of Premera Blue Cross`s nationally recognized Polypharmacy Program.

In a recent two-year assessment of nearly 13,000 Premera members, Seattle-based health services researchers observed a 1.2 percentage point decrease in persons having ER visits and a 1 percentage point decrease in persons having hospitalizations after members were mailed a simple brown bag with a set of instructions.

PATIENT SAFETY IS THE GOAL

Patients were asked to fill the brown bag with all their prescriptions, over-the-counter medications, and supplements and to take the bag to their next doctor`s appointment for review. Premera had found many of its members not only were receiving multiple medications but also had multiple doctors. By putting all the drugs in one place, a provider could assess the appropriateness of the medications and change dosages if necessary.

The new analysis, whose key findings are now being released, noted that pharmacy utilization did increase after the program materials were mailed. A reduction in total healthcare costs was also observed by Premera based on a review of relevant claims data.

However, Ed Wong, Premera`s vice president of Pharmacy Services, points out that the Polypharmacy Program was never intended to save money on drug costs. “The goal of this program has always been patient safety,” says Wong. “Our intention with this brown bag review is for patients to get a better assortment of drugs and suffer fewer adverse reactions.”

Premera has mailed out approximately 150,000 bags since the program began in 2001. The bags are sent to members in Washington, Oregon and Alaska who are 19 and older and who are taking five or more drugs daily over a three-month period for chronic conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension or high cholesterol.

ANALYSIS INDICATES DECREASED HOSPITALIZATIONS

In one of the key observations, the researchers found that 22.8 percent of the patients had gone to the emergency room in the year before they had received their brown bags, while 21.6 percent went during the year after they had taken part in the program. Meanwhile, 12.9 percent had been hospitalized the year prior to the program, compared to 11.9 percent the year after.

The program has drawn national media coverage and has been highlighted in an advertising campaign by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. In annual surveys, an average 51 percent of respondents since 2001 have reported undergoing a medication review, while 51 percent said they found the informational brochures in the bags to be somewhat to very valuable.

Read more about Premera Blue Cross`s drug safety program.

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 6, 937 (November 2007)

There is a pressing need to improve the understanding of safety issues during drug development and post-approval. Our interviewees this month explain their roles in efforts to enhance drug safety.

Julie Barnes, Ph.D. Chief Scientific Officer, BioWisdom Ltd., Cambridge, UK

Recent high-profile issues with drug safety have highlighted the need not only to improve post-marketing pharmacovigilance but also to identify drug candidates with good safety profiles earlier. To address these challenges, healthcare technology companies such as BioWisdom are providing intelligence to support decision-making about safety issues that arise during the development of new drugs. “Our approach is founded on the principles of ontology. This is a traditional science that applies a relationship-based approach to, for example, understand mechanisms of drug action as they pertain to adverse events,” explains CSO Julie Barnes.

Barnes’ career in drug development began when, following her Ph.D. in behavioural neuroscience, she took a postdoctoral position at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to develop a series of in vivo models and screens for evaluating new chemical entities for Alzheimer’s disease. Although initially very specialized in her discipline, over the next 15 years, she began to recognize the value of multidisciplinary research to bring different perspectives and technologies to a business problem.

“While at GSK, I saw projects come and go, clinical trials succeed and fail, and markets change,” she says. “Managing change and decision-making in such an environment is an experience that I am pleased to have had the opportunity to acquire.”

During this time, Barnes also experienced the rapid expansion in electronic information, which changed the behaviour of scientists from browsing current journals in company libraries to searching e-publications and other electronic data from their desktops. “Getting access to relevant information without being deluged with too much became an increasing challenge,” she explains.

 Learn more about drug safety.