March 27, 2008
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and several US drugmakers, including health care giant Johnson & Johnson, are supporting a not-for-profit venture by the iHealth Alliance to modernize the procedure for delivering drug safety alerts to US physicians.
The Health Care Notification Network is the result of a three-year effort to replace a widely-criticized and decades old system which relied on the US postal service.
Instead, of this, an e-mail delivery system has been introduced.
Nancy Dickey, the former president of the American Medical Association and chairperson of the iHealth Alliance, said: "relying on paper-based US mail and weeks of delay to deliver time-urgent patient safety alerts to doctors in 2008 is indefensible and unsafe."
The group also credited the Food and Drug Administration for its support of on-line network of patient safety alerts and the reporting of adverse events.
The scale of the joint venture is made clear from a list of the stakeholders supporting the HCNN effort. This includes: medical society leaders; liability carriers; health plans; consumer advocacy groups; government leaders and the drug industry.
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