E-drug: Electronic Essential Drugs Resources
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Dear E-druggers,
It seems to us that there is a huge need for various levels of drug
information to support the essential drugs process and rational drug
use. Although there are several good resources available such as
WHO and country level EDLs, treatment guidelines, formularies,
price guides - many of these resources are not available
electronically, and certainly few of the resources are interlinked in
such a way that one can seamlessly move between different types
of drug information.
Although most health systems in developing countries may not
currently be at a stage where individual health workers have
adequate access to computer networks to use such an interlinked
resource should it be available, it could still do a lot to support
those developing and maintaining the content, researchers and
policy makers. Longer term one may hope that such resources
could be integrated into clinical care systems.
If we feel that such a resource would be useful there are at least 2
areas of difficulty in implementation:
* obtaining the political commitment and consensus of stakeholders
to make their content resources available in a suitable format
* modelling how to store and interlink this information. This is not a
trivial problem as there are few internationally recognised coding
systems to represent drug knowledge at all the different levels
required to link therapeutic/clinical information to inventory and
procurement etc.
To avoid duplication of effort, and to make any work we do as
widely useful as possible, we would very much like to hear from
anyone who either has some experience in this area, or has been
thinking about doing anything like this themselves.
We are planning to have a work group of some sort to take this
forward - let us know if you might be interested in participating
(understand that we'll need to keep it small and manageable).
Thanks,
Candy Day
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Candy Day
HealthLink, Health Systems Trust
e-mail: candy@healthlink.org.za
http://www.hst.org.za
July 2000-July 2001 at Tufts in Boston, USA
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