Tuesday, March 16, 2010

My Experience - Dr. Anil Vij

I am a practicing physician, M.D., Medicine from Kanpur medical College, India, having my own nursing home in Delhi. It had been my long cherished dream to develop a software which could be called as clinician’s companion in true sense & help them in every respect to write a safe, fool proof & first rate prescription. After 10 years of hard work I think the dream has become reality now with the development of a prescription writing software called “PRESCRIPTION PAD”.
Prescription writing is not merely putting few drug names on a piece of paper rather it is an art which can be attained only after years of experience, hard work & sound knowledge of the basic subject. World over, there is stress on evidence based medicine which can be described as “the conscientious, explicit & judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions”. Professional organizations & government agencies are developing formal clinical practice guidelines in an effort to aid physicians & other caregivers in this endeavor. These guidelines can provide a useful framework for managing patients with particular diagnosis or symptoms. The challenge for the physician is to integrate into clinical practice the useful recommendations offered by the experts who prepare clinical practice guidelines without accepting them blindly or being inappropriately constrained by them.
A report from the Institute of Medicine, USA concluded that “to err is human” but called for an ambitious agenda to reduce medical error rates & improve patient safety by designing & implementing fundamental changes in health care system. Accordingly it is the responsibility of hospitals & health care organizations to develop systems to reduce risk & ensure patient safety.
We have designed our software on these general guidelines. The software at the moment has a database of more than 40,000 brands with full prescribing information, full information about nearly 24,00 drugs with their complete monographs to backup, information about 1500 diseases , their differential diagnosis, investigatory workup, many treatment guideline & protocols & other important pointers along with patients education material. The software automatically checks for drug interactions & drug safety for children & elderly, pregnancy, lactation, liver insufficiency, renal insufficiency, pulmonary insufficiency & gives you warning in case of any untoward effect. The software has capability of giving you useful pointers also from time to time while writing prescription. The software checks for the drug safety at the individual disease level too e.g. it gives you warning if any drug is not safe to give in PORPHYRIA or G6PD disease or in diabetes. In this way the software tries to ensure that you give out 100% safe, first rate & fool proof prescription to a patient by providing you all the related information automatically.
The complete details of the software features can be seen on the website www.prescriptionpad.in.
Drug interactions & drug safety is major issue in prescription writing especially in multi-organ diseases where large number of drugs are prescribed. In such situations this software can be very useful.
I am giving some common examples of drug interactions in day-to-day practice :

Ace inhibitors with Aspirin Reduces hypotensive effects of ace inhibitors
Quinolones with Nsaids CNS excitation
Eltroxin with Iron Poor absorption of Eltroxin
Zinc with Iron & other minerals
Quinolones,
Tetracyclines Poor absorption
Antacids with Antibiotics Poor absorption /chelation

The usefulness of the software is realized only when you start using it & I am sure it would encourage more & more clinicians to use computers & may change the in day-to-day practice : Ace
inhibitors with Aspirin Reduces hypotensive effects of ace inhibitors Quinolones
with Nsaids CNS excitation Eltroxin with Iron Poor absorption of Eltroxin Zinc
with Iron & other minerals Quinolones, Tetracyclines Poor absorption Antacids
with Antibiotics Poor absorption /chelation The usefulness of the software is
realized only when you start using it & I am sure it would encourage more & more
clinicians to use computers & may change the way doctors write prescription in
future.


Regards

Dr anil vij

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