Pfizer is turning to electronic health records and mobile technology to improve its drug-safety monitoring and communication with physicians, Medical Marketing & Media reports.
The drug manufacturer has partnered with Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston for a project called Aster, or Adverse drug event Spontaneous Triggered Event Reporting.
The project uses automated prompts in the hospital's EHR system to encourage doctors to report adverse events that might be associated with prescription drugs. The project also collects additional information about patients to help determine whether an adverse event was caused by the drug or another factor (Arnold, Medical Marketing & Media, 3/30).
Pfizer also has partnered with Epocrates -- a developer of physician software for smart phones and other mobile devices -- to include a function in Epocrates applications that lets physicians directly call or e-mail Pfizer for additional information about the company's products.
In addition, Pfizer has partnered with Sermo, an online physician community, to allow physicians on the networking site to contact Pfizer with medical questions.
Freda Lewis-Hall, Pfizer's chief medical officer, said the drug manufacturer is looking into other technologies that could help improve its collection of drug safety data (Loftus, Dow Jones Newswires, 3/25).
Pfizer Posts Physician Payments Online
In related news, Pfizer on Wednesday disclosed online that it paid about $20 million in consulting and speaking fees to 4,500 physicians and other medical professionals in the last six months of 2009, the New York Times reports. In addition, Pfizer paid $15.3 million to 250 academic medical centers and research groups for clinical trials during the last half of 2009.
Pfizer spokesperson Kristen Neese said the company was required to make most of the disclosures under an integrity agreement it signed in August to settle a federal investigation into the illegal promotion of drugs for off-label use.
Eli Lilly, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline also disclose such information online. All of the drug makers' Web sites are searchable by the names of physicians and organizations, but the sites are not set up to allow downloading and analyzing of data (Wilson, New York Times, 3/31).