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May 4, 2004

 
Study Praises PDAs at the Point-of-Care

The March 1, 2004 issue of the American Journal of Medicine featured a survey on the "Identification of Drug-Drug Interactions with Personal Digital Assistant-Based Software," in which the ePocrates Rx Pro drug reference was highly rated. Based on defined patient profiles, prescriptions and drug-drug interaction pairs, the drug-drug interaction warnings from six PDA-based programs were documented and then used to calculate the sensitivity, specificity, negative predictive values and positive predictive values for each program.

The survey results suggest that the "software is effective in the identification of important drug-drug interactions and therefore has the potential to reduce the frequency of preventable adverse drug events," wrote the survey's authors Robert L. Robinson, MD, and Martha S. Buck, MD, of the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

The authors further emphasized that efforts to deploy such PDA-based programs in a wide range of clinical settings has the "potential to improve patient safety."
posted by Kent 5:23 PM | |

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