A P&T Committee's Transition to a Complete Electronic Meeting System-A Multisite Institution Experience.

PURPOSE: In the last few decades, changes to formulary management processes have taken place in institutions with closed formulary systems. However, many P&T committees continued to operate using traditional paper-based systems. Paper-based systems have many limitations, including confidentiality, efficiency, open voting, and paper wastage. This becomes more challenging when dealing with a multisite P&T committee that handles formulary matters across the whole health care system. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of the first paperless, completely electronic, Web-based formulary management system across a large health care system in the Middle East. SUMMARY: We describe the transitioning of a multisite P&T committee in a large tertiary care institution from a paper-based to an all-electronic system. The challenges and limitations of running a multisite P&T committee utilizing a paper system are discussed. The design and development of a Web-based committee floor management application that can be used from notebooks, tablets, and hand-held devices is described. Implementation of a flexible, interactive, easy-to-use, and efficient electronic formulary management system is explained in detail. CONCLUSION: The development of an electronic P&T committee meeting system that encompasses electronic document sharing, voting, and communication could help multisite health care systems unify their formularies across multiple sites. Our experience might not be generalizable to all institutions because this depends heavily on system features, existing processes and workflow, and implementation across different sites.

Assessment of foetal risk associated with 93 non-US-FDA approved medications during pregnancy.

Health care practitioners utilize the United States-Food and Drug Administration (US-FDA) pregnancy categorization (A, B, C, D, X) for making decision on the appropriateness of certain medications during pregnancy. Many non US-FDA approved medications are registered and marketed in Saudi Arabia. However, these medications do not have an assigned pregnancy risk categorization like those approved in the US. The objective of this review is to evaluate, report, and categorize the foetal risk associated with non-US-FDA approved medications registered by the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (S-FDA) according to the US-FDA pregnancy risk categorization system. We identified 109 non-US-FDA approved medications in the Saudi National Formulary (SNF) as of October 2007. We searched for data on functional or anatomical birth defects or embryocidal-associated risk using different databases and references. An algorithm for risk assessment was used to determine a pregnancy risk category for each medication. Out of 93 eligible medications, 73% were assigned category risk C, 10 medications (11%) were assigned category risk D, and 12 medications (13%) were assigned category risk B. Only three medications were judged to be safe during pregnancy based on the available evidence and were assigned category risk A. Inconsistencies in defining and reporting the foetal risk category among different drug regulatory authorities could create confusion and affect prescribing. We believe that standardization and inclusion of this information in the medication package insert is extremely important to all health care practitioners.