E-Records Capture Drug Reactions

Electronic health records could dramatically improve physicians' reporting of serious adverse side effects experienced by patients taking prescription drugs, suggests a recent study.

The Food and Drug Administration requires reporting of such events, yet in a five-month period in 2007 and 2008, a group of 26 doctors in a study at Boston's Massachusetts General and Brigham & Women's hospitals reported no serious drug side effects.

During the same five-month period a year later, those physicians reported 217 side effects, one in five of which were serious. Some of those reactions required hospitalization, according to the Brigham & Women's internist leading the study.

The difference? An automated tool in the hospitals' electronic health record system triggered an alert when a medication was discontinued, according to the Wall Street Journal. The tool asked physicians who were discontinuing a drug about the severity of the side effect and automatically sent a report to the FDA.

The study, sponsored by Pfizer Inc., was published online earlier this month by the Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety medical journal. The findings "suggest widespread adoption of electronic health records could help the FDA identify problems with drugs," the Wall Street Journal reported.