Pharmatica: Supporting the Complex Pharmaceutical Information Needs in the Changing Healthcare Sector

Pharmatica-Supporting the complex Pharmatica-Supporting the complex Pharmatica-Supporting the complex Pharmatica-Supporting the complex Pharmatica-Supporting the complex pharmaceutical information needs in the pharmaceutical information needs in the pharmaceutical information needs in the pharmaceutical information needs in the pharmaceutical information needs in the changing healthcare sector changing healthcare sector changing healthcare sector changing healthcare sector changing healthcare sector How to effectively distribute and use pharmaceutical information has long been the main concern of the healthcare sector. In medical practice it is often said that knowledge is powerful medicine, for it is the quality of information that determines the quality of diagnosis and therapy. Pharmaceutical application information by nature is highly complex and specialized knowledge. Newly discovered and developed new drugs are getting ever more complicated so that it is difficult for healthcare professionals to keep themselves current. The complexity and cost-insensitive nature of pharmaceuticals also cause, at least partially, the inefficiency in the information distribution process. The traditional way of marketing pharmaceuticals and distributing pharmaceutical information is sales representatives visits to the general physicians. While there are some advantages of this method such as personal contacts and interactive communication , this involves time-consuming and high-cost activities for both the sales representatives and the doctors. The high price of pharmaceuticals has raised wide concern of the efficiency of medical care in the health community, which also often causes tension between the commercial promotion of pharmaceuticals and the practice of pharmaceutical medicine. Recently the Dutch government has promoted a campaign of cost-effec-tion Management). The purpose of this project is to develop an information platform that provides those who use pharmaceutical information with integrated and better structured information for more effective use in various fields of information application. This paper sum-marises and reports the main findings from the first phase of the project. The pharmaceutical market is very different from common consumer goods markets. First, the main pharmaceutical information consumers (i.e. the doctors) are not the pharmaceutical product consumers (i.e. the patients). In other words, the doctors are purchasing decision makers for the patients. Figure 1 shows the information flows between various parties in the healthcare sector. The Pharmatica project particularly focuses primarily the information flows around the physicians who are the main information users. Secondly, the pharmaceutical market has traditionally been regulated and cost insensitive. The branded pharmaceutical market is historically an oligopoly with enormous profit due to the patent protection to the branded drugs. …