EPN - Electronic Prescribing News

Daily News - October 4, 2004 - Monday

Vioxx recall seen as victory for patient safety
Source: Healthcare IT News  /  Author: Jack Beaudoin, Editor

"A beautiful example of pure patient safety.”

That’s how one doctor described the industry’s response to last week’s unexpected blockbuster recall of Merck’s popular inflammatory drug Vioxx.

Technology-savvy physicians like Dr. Salvatore Volpe of Staten Island, New York, were able to begin notifying patients who had been prescribed the drug within hours of the first FDA recall alerts.

“I saw the announcement of the recall on television and went to CNN.com to learn more,” said Volpe, who has been using Zix Corp’s e-prescribing tool, PocketScript, for about a year-and-a-half. “Because PocketScript allows you to do several kinds of reporting, I was able to create a report based on drug-dispensed records over the last two years… Bing! It popped up 16 patients who had been prescribed Vioxx by me or by another doctor.”

Volpe said the whole process took about 30 seconds. Without the technology, he said “I would have sat down with my office manager … We would have had to pull charts manually. To get a yield of 16 patients from the 2,500 we see, it would have easily cost $500 out of pocket – it would have been very labor-intensive and very costly.”

Zix isn’t the only company that is touting its technology after the Vioxx recall. Epocrates notes that within six hours of receiving the MedWatch alert from the FDA Safety Information and Adverse Event Reporting Program, its team had updated its database, pushed the a revised monograph out to all Epocrates users, and sent out an FDA MedWatch DocAlert(R) message with the withdrawal notice.

“The ability of Epocrates to rapidly respond to this situation clearly shows the advantages of having access to electronic databases at the point of care,” said CEO Kirk Loevner in a company statement issued on Oct. 1. “We had the unique ability to instantly update our clinical content with the latest FDA information and then directly reach more than 420,000 physicians and other health care professionals who rely on our mobile references.”

At North Fulton Family Medicine, clinicians quickly generated an 89-page report of patients using Vioxx thanks to the practice’s electronic medical record from A4 Health Systems. North Fulton Family Medicine handles 72,000 patient encounters annually, so generating the same report from paper records would have been “enormous, if not impossible,” according to a spokesperson.

“I’ve been trying to preach the value of this for years now,” said Volpe, who counts himself among e-prescribing’s early adopters. “”This shows how technology makes a difference. After today, who wouldn’t want to use these tools?”