Development of community pharmacy database on-line interactive retrieval system for electronic drug information / Prof Dr. Abu Bakar Abdul Majeed, Mustafar Kamal Hamzah dan Ezlina Usir

Community pharmacists counsel patients and answer questions about drugs, side effects
or interactions. They provide information about over-the-counter drugs and make
recommendations after talking with the patient. They also may give advice about the patient's
diet, exercise, or stress management or about durable medical equipment and home health care
supplies. Some community pharmacists provide specialized services to help patients manage
diabetes, asthma, smoking cessation, and high blood pressure. A good user-friendly drug
information system for the use of community pharmacists is lacking. This research project aims
to design and build an organized database of specialized information on drug therapeutics to meet
the drug information needs of the community pharmacist, expand the role of the pharmacist in
providing drug information services to the community, and use computer software program
designed to check prescriptions for duplicate drug therapies, potential drug-drug and drug-allergy
interaction, with the view of developing it into a pharmacoinformatics or telemedicine system
application in the near future. Data is initially stored in Microsoft SQL, while the interface of the
database has been created using Visual Basic 6.0. Among the facilities provided by the system
include accessing information on drugs by name list, brand name or registration number.
Information provided are 'action', 'dose & missed dose', 'duration and adr' (adverse drug
reaction), 'similar product' and 'precaution storage & notes'. There is also advice on the use in
special cases: Infancy, Child, Adult, Elderly and Pregnant. A search on drugs can be done by
generic name, brand name or registration number. Users can search information on diseases,
which are explained by five categories: 'description', 'symptom/sign', 'trigger factor', product'
and 'other info'. There is also an option to visualise in picture form drugs (pills) for quick and easy identification. The pharmacist can update, delete or insert new data on all the above
facilities, using restricted access.
IRDC(RD)/FLA. 2006
The system can be used by the community pharmacist as the database is specially prepared for
use in such setting, where primary care is provided to the public. For future enhancement,
especially in terms of flexibility, a web-based application has been proposed.