Coordinateur : Jean-Baptiste Lamy

Responsable LIMICS : LAMY Jean-Baptiste

Autres membres LIMICS : Catherine Duclos - Fadi Badra - Adrien Ugon - Hélène Berthelot - Lilia Kraiem

Résumé :

Pharmaceutical innovations sometimes lead to a major improvement in therapeutics, but many new drugs bring only slight improvements. However, serious adverse drug events are in constant increase, they are a major problem in public health and have an important economic cost, and this is particularly true for new drugs. As a consequence, it is very important to prescribe them more appropriately, by taking into account the most recent and independent information available.

Physicians have several possible sources of information related to pharmaceutical innovation. The most important one is pharmaceutical sales representatives, however they are not independent from pharmaceutical companies, and it has been shown that their visits lead to a lower quality of physicians’ prescriptions. Moreover, some countries like France are adopting more restrictive legislation regarding pharmaceutical sales representatives, thus Other sources of information include medical journals (e.g. the French journal Prescrire), literature reviews and current awareness systems (e.g. newsletter from national agencies), however they have a limited impacts on physicians. They usually provide a synthetic and up-to-date information at the time of their publication, but not necessarily at the time of the consultation by the physicians. Today, to obtain a clear idea of the position of a new drug, a physician has to: (1) search in many fragmented sources of information (drug monographs present in drug databases, journals and periodicals, clinical practice guidelines, summaries of national agencies reports, etc), (2) read the documents found, which is tedious, because they are long text documents, and (3) make his own synthesis, and assess that the information found is independent and up-to-date. This process is very time-consuming and most physicians do not have the time for it.

The objective of the project is to develop an online platform for collecting, synthetising and diffusing knowledge related to pharmaceutical innovation, in order to help physicians to easily and rapidly access to the latest, independent, drug knowledge. This platform will: (1) automatically collect information from various, independent and up-to-date sources, (2) enrich this information with syntheses reviewed by independent medical experts (e.g. from national agencies), and (3) present this knowledge to physicians, in a pleasant and easy-to-consult format, including text but also iconic and visual representations.

The design of the platform will be divided in three parts. The first part will be devoted to the collection of information. We will select a set of information sources, which are both independent and regularly updated, and design tool for the automatic extraction of information from these sources, and for automatically linking information from the various sources.

The second part is devoted to the synthesis of the knowledge. We will design a conceptual model of pharmaceutical innovation; the platform will instantiate this model with the information collected previously. Then this model will be used to generate various syntheses, such as comparison tables, indicators, etc. This syntheses will then be presented to a medical expert for reviewing.

The third part will be in charge of diffusing the knowledge extracted and synthetised in a graphical, easy-to-read, format destined to physicians. In particular, approaches based on iconic languages (e.g. icon for presenting the various adverse effects or contraindications of a drug) and information visualisation (e.g. bar charts or diagrams) will be considered.

Finally, the platform will be implemented and rigorously evaluated under controlled conditions.
This platform has numerous and important potential impacts in the medical landscape: for patients, it could lead to a better use of new drugs and a reduced occurrence of adverse drug events, for physicians, to a facilitated update of their knowledge, for health insurance, to a lower economic cost for reimbursement of drug treatments and for dealing with drug side effects, for national agencies, to a new way to diffuse drug knowledge towards health professionals, for pharmaceutical companies, to a reduction of their impact on prescribers’ behavior and an incentive to develop value-added innovation.

Partenaires

SFTG- Madeleine Favre