E-mail drug alerts for US physicians launched

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.