Book Review: T.F. Donohue and C.R. Sprouse. Drug formularies and the pharmaceutical industry: thriving in the managed care era. Massachusetts: Parexel International Corp., 1995. 142 pp. price unknown.
✍ Scribed by Rhona Panton
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 114 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0749-6753
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
the development of telemedicine in the USA. Failure to link projects to major organizational plans and business objectives, plus poor planning, are cited as reasons why pilot projects did not survive.
A broad evaluation framework is proposed, and discussed, which focuses on the eects of telemedicine on quality, accessibility, cost and acceptability of health care. It is suggested that this broad framework will strengthen evaluation designs and promote comparable evaluations so that a stronger base of knowledge about telemedicine can be built. During the exploration of current activities, the Institute of Medicine identi®ed an independent, non-pro®t-making organization that pools information from multiple evaluations. The collaboration approach has enabled tools to be developed to support evaluations; for example: the `Evaluation Question Hierarchy' has been designed to generate speci®c questions tailored to particular problems so that researchers do not have to start anew on each project. It is believed that the use of a common question structure will be one way of encouraging pooling of data from dierent projects.
Although many elements of the evaluation framework can be found in evaluation methods publications, the telemedicine report does include two aspects that are less commonly covered. The framework highlights the need for documentation, not only on how the technical infrastructure and the clinical processes of care were intended to operate, but also the tracking of what actually occurs. There is also an emphasis on the inclusion of a business plan which should state how the implementation and evaluation are designed to provide information that decision makers can use to decide whether the application is sustainable.
Recognition of the need for evaluation methods in health information systems is a current vogue on both sides of the Atlantic, with publications of methodological texts on how to design, carry out and interpret studies; and the problems of evaluation in medical informatics (Friedman and Wyatt, 1996). The added value of this book for managers, clinicians and policy makers interested in telemedicine is the inclusion of the special characteristics of telemedicine that warrant particular notice from evaluators and decision makers. As acknowledged within the text, the report has focused on activities in the USA, but the proposed framework and suggestion of pooling of information from dierent evaluations is applicable worldwide.