DRUG INFORMATION

DEFINITION:

 Drug information services refer to the activities undertaken by pharmacists in

providing information to drug use. Drug information center provides in-depth,
unbiased source of crucial drug information to meet needs of the practicing
physicians, pharmacists and other health care professionals.
 It is the current, relevant, critically examined data about drug and drug use for given
patient or situation.
 Many institutes run DIC(Drug Information Center) for the provision of drug
information, to every group/kind of people from any place.

NEED OF DRUG INFORMATION

 The no of drugs in the international market has increased very much
 The newer drugs are generally more potent & selective, and formulations becoming
increasingly complex
 The literature on drugs has also expanded and covers a wide range of information
 To introduce a new drug into the practice, the professionals need to evaluate the given
information.
 A simple,quick reference to a pharmacopoeia or formulary is no longer sufficient.
 Due to fast scientific developments and consequent research possibilities in the last few
decades lot of new drugs and formulations are added daily to the book of drugs,
throughout the world.
SUITABLE PERSON TO BE INCHARGE OF DIC:
 In a hospital setup, pharmacist is a member of Pharmacy and Therapeutic Committee, and
incharge of hospital library, hence a pharmacist is suitable to be incharge of Drug
Information Center.
 Usually, informations are provided by drug manufacturers, distributors and their
representatives. By nature of his job pharmacist is always in touch with these sources of
information. Hence he can collect those informations easily. Moreover these information
suppliers are his fellow pharmacists or their employees thus, a natural binding exists
between them.
 Pharmacists undergo a thorough education about drugs and their physical, chemical,
pharmaceutical and pharmacological properties for few years. Hence they are more
knowledgeable than others about drugs and that knowledge is useful in critically
evaluating all literatures available about the drugs and selecting a correct information.
 Those informations can be edited by him and passed on to the needed persons. Thus none
other than a pharmacist is suitable to be incharge of Drug Information Center.
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF DRUG INFORMATIN SERVICES
 The provision of information to health professionals on specific problems related to the
use of drugs in particular patients.
 The provision of information to officials in government agencies to optimize the decision
making process.
 The preparation and development of guidelines and formularies.
 To improve patient compliance and to provide a guide to responsible self medication.
 To develop and participate in continuing education programs.
 To participate in undergraduate and graduate teaching programs.
 To develop educational activities regarding the appropriate use of drugs for patients in the
community.
 To prepare and distribute material on drugs to health personnel in the form of a drug
Information bulletin and/or other media.
 To develop and participate in research programs.

SOURCES OF INFORMATION /RESOURCES:

Primary Source:
 Information is presented by authors without any evaluation by a second party.
 Provides must current information about drugs.
 Examples; articles published in journals(eg British Medical Journal), thesis etc.
Secondary source
 The original source has been evaluated by second party other than the publisher.
 Modified and rearranged form
 Examples; review articles like lexis-nexis, Medline etc
Tertiary source
 Information obtained from primary and secondary source and arranged in a manner
to represent a composite of the available information.
  Examples; Representative form Pharmacopeias - BP, USP, IP, BNF etc.,
Encyclopedia Dictionaries Guides, text books
COMPUTERIZED SERVICES:
 This is one of the secondary sources of information, where details are collected from
various sources edited and published as data bases, in [Link] format or uploaded in
websites or portals of internet. They are further differenciated into indexing services and
abstracting services. Both these services are very much useful for libraries and
information centers like Drug Information centers, where online searching can be used for
searching database of remote locations without networking facilities and for use by single
users, on the otherhand CD is used when many people use the same computer.
 Abstracting Services: As the name indicates it contains the summaries or abstracts of
original reports. It also interpret the original report according to editorial guidelines.
Popular examples are
 (a) Drugdex
 (b) International Pharmaceutical Abstract
 (c) Pharmline.
 Pharmline database ([Link] is an abstracting system deals with
drugs and professional pharmacy practice. This data base abstracts articles on pharmacy
practice and clinical use of drugs from over 100 English pharmacy and medical journals
and produced by National Health Service Information specialists.
 International pharmaceutical abstracts is produced by American Society of Health System
(ASHP) pharmacists. It has abstracts from the articles published in more than 750
pharmacy, medical and other health related journals, published worldwide. This service is
there from 1970. It is a paid service, available via [Link]
1. Medline services
2. BIOSIS [Biosciences information service] previews
3. Clinalert
4. Embase
5. IDIS (Iowa drug Information System)
RETRIEVAL INFORMATION:
 As the database contain millions and millions of informations, retrieval of information
require some skill. If you are able to search with precious or correct terms, the retrieval is
easier.
 To do that indexing language of the data base (controlled vocabulary or thesaurus or
keywords) should be used.
 All possible synonyms, if used, make the search easier, on the otherhand if a common
language or free text is used, all relevant information may not be obtained. Hence before
starting the search, a clear question must be framed. For example, "How effective are
ACE inhibitors in the treatment of heart failure?".
 The next step is to choose relavant subject headings or key words to include in the search.
These can be included in the search question using the Boolean operators (and/or/not) to
get relavant citations.
 Some databases like Medline and Embase, use sub headings like Adverse effects, Use,
Diagnosis etc, to direct the search towards the specific question.

DRUG LITERATURE EVALUATION

 Among the skills of drug information is a knowledge of drug literature evaluation
 which allows one to provide a critical analysis of the literature and have a better
understanding of the studies done in health and medicine.
 It is a key component to provide a good quality answer to a requester
 Being able to separate good data from poor data is essential
 Knowing the limitations of any study can help in evaluating the usability of its data
 Drug information specialists will often use some standard questions to help in this
process.
 Several references provide guides to evaluate the medical and pharmacy literature

EVALUATION OF SOURCES OF INFORMATION:

 Drug information is also collected from many primary, secondary and tertiary sources.
Among them secondary and tertiary sources are less reliable as they are just collected by
third parties from primary sources of information.
 The primary sources of information are the original research articles, patent applications
etc.
 Most of the time a pharmacist administering the DIC need not critically evaluate these
primary research articles, as these works are normally carried out by research scientists,
reviewers or editorial board experts of scientific journals before publication.
 Hence a pharmacist of DIC who receive publications from reputed journals and
magazines need not burden him with such difficult tasks. However these are the duties
Clinical Pharmacists hence they should learn it. That is why the method of 'Critical
Evaluation of Biomedical Literature' is separately given in another chapter.

SYSTEMIC APPROACH IN ANSWERING DRUG INFORMATION

QUERIES:
 Drug information queries cannot be answered casually, just like that in any customer
centre of public relations office as it involve life saving drugs. In order to give, vital and
needed information, drug information centre pharmacist has to approach in systematic
manner. Watanabe and Conner have described well, approach for answering DI queries in
their paper Principles of Drug Information [Drug Intell Publ, Hamilton IL: 15,1978].
Incorporating those suggestions, before answering the question DIC pharmacist should
ask questions either to the enquirer or himself. They are, the following

1. Who is enquiring?
2. What is his purpose?
3. What is the background information?
[Link] category the query belongs to?
5. How to retrieve the answer quickly?
6. Is the answer retrieved worth disseminating?
7. How best the answer can be provided?
8. What is the feed back?
Let us analyze the answers to the above questions in detail.

SUMMARY OF FUNCTIONS OF DRIG INFORMATION

CENTER:
1. Establishing and maintaining a system for getting information about drugs.

2. Providing information to Inservice training or continuous education programmes.

3. Answering queries from Research Scholors, PG students, Poison information center

4. Answering questions from physicians regarding drugs and therapy.

 5. Preparation and distribution of periodical Drug Information bulletins to doctors,
nurses, pharmacists and students of these courses.

6. Helping in the preparation and maintainence of Hospital Formulary or Drugs list.

7. Critical analysis of pharmacy literatures and filing them with comments

8. Above all, clearing the doubts and answering the enquiries of general public
regarding their treatment.

9. Producing educational materials for Mass Education Programs.

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10. Co-ordinating with outside agencies relating to Drug Informations, in serving the
community at large and.

11. Maintaining a record of all enquiries.

REFERENCES:

1. Textbook of Hospital and Clinical pharmacy, [Link],

[Link].
2. [Link]
3. [Link]