Re: [Gnumed-devel] Drug Progress

[Horst Herb]

richard terry wrote:
> Having worked for many years with this data and knowing how the internals 
> work in prescribing, I think it would be much better to keep the drug data in 
> its original form. BTW Mims probably prefer to give us the XML stuff.

The MIMS data in it's original form does not lend itself to decision 
support as we envision it.
At a recent meeting at the NPS involving people from the AMH (Australian 
Medical Handbook) and vendors from the software industry there was no 
doubt about this.
While MIMS is (arguably ?) the most comprehensive reference for brand 
products in Australia, apart from it's interaction database it is not 
much more than a compilaion of vendor-provided information.

I do think that MIMS will play a role for us in the foreseeable future, 
but the role for it as I see it is a complementary one, as an optional 
source for our generic drug database for those drugs where we don't have 
(enough) information from other sources. I am sure that most GPs would 
continue subscribing MIMS just for that purpose, even I would do so.

But we must not limit ourselves to their data model!!! And we must not 
commit the mistake of having more than one API for pharmaceutical 
reference. Hence, MIMS dta can only be used by massaging it into our own 
drugref based database.

Horst