Re: [Gnumed-devel] Drugref & the PDAs (?)

[J Busser]

At 12:44 AM -0400 6/18/05, Michael Bonert wrote:
> Has there been any consideration to make a (stand-alone) PDA version 
> of drug ref? 

For now, Lexi-Comp (commercial) is available to Canadian Medical 
Association members (including students) through the CMA web site. 
This product offers the advantage of listing those drugs available in 
Canada (whether or not available in the US), also Canadian trade 
names, and does not track or report your usage.

A PDA application would require an appropriate database and user 
interface. Maybe people can advise if there exists an open source PDA 
software suitable to sync with Postgres. But anyone who would 
seriously consider going to this trouble would probably want to more 
generally consider it as a component of a PDA-based EMR-lite. There 
exists an open source project in British Columbia aiming to permit a 
group of GPs to input and share electronic summaries of their 
"frequent flier" (high-morbidity) patients in a mobile fashion while 
on-call. That project uses Palm Treos and the Palm OS.

More generally I have been wondering what are the limits to what we 
would WANT drugref to do.

In British Columbia we have a provincial system "PharmaNet" by which 
doctors *could* gain read-only access to a list of prescriptions that 
patients have had filled.

Right now we have an impediment to rolling this out, on account of 
licensing problems with First Data Bank through which I believe 
PharmaNet gets its monograph and drug interaction information.

So I was wondering... even if drugref *did* accumulate sufficient 
monographs to become a first-choice for some monograph info (and does 
anyone know whether the American Hospital Pharmacists' Formulary info 
is known to be biased?) --- would drugref's contributors truly wish 
to maintain their own drug interaction database? Drug interaction 
databases are things that I would imagine are very tedious to 
maintain. Also I expect there to be less bias in the production and 
maintenance of this information than, say, manufacturers' claims of 
drug effectiveness.