MD Access to Drug Profiles to Reduce Adverse Reactions

Adverse drug reactions are a major source of preventable morbidity and mortality, especiallyamong the elderly, who are both more sensitive to and are taking larger numbers of differentmedications. The insurance industry has recently addressed this problem through the implementationof drug interaction alerts to pharmacists in conjunction with immediate on line claims adjudication foralmost 60% of prescriptions (and increasing rapidly). These alerts are based on stored patient drugprofiles of third party administrators (TPAs) which are updated whenever prescriptions are filled. Whilethese alerts are very helpful, the pharmacist does not prescribe, resulting in time-consuming and costlydelays to contact the physician to remedy potential interactions. We will address this problem byevaluating the feasibility of making the drug profile and interaction information easily available to thephysician before the prescription is written. By utilizing the existing drug profiles from TPAs and initiallyproviding information delivery to physicians by fax using touch-tone phone requests, we believe that thissystem can be created and operated cost-effectively. Delivering the relevant information to the point ofdecision should result in further decreases in adverse drug reactions, simultaneously improving thequality and decreasing the cost of medical care.