Michael Christie wrote: > Dear All, > May I beg your comments? > We are considering moving from Locum to Best Practice. > Apparently the third party database people tell me they can transfer all > the data from Locum to BP, how well I don't know. > One biggish problem is that Locum uses MIMS drug database which we are > happy with, and BP uses APPCo. > So as far as I know the migrating of the Pts drug history and current > medication may mean just a document with a list of medications in the > letters section of BP, not really putting the current medications into > BP that can be straight away prescribed. > Also current allergies which uses MIMS Interact, probably won't work on > the new package as well as that drug database is different. > If we used a package that had MIMS as a database my guess is that the > Current Meds and allergies would come straight across to the new package. > What comments do my colleagues have re the above?
The strategic, long-term answer to all of this is the "Australian Medicines Terminology" (AMT) project from NEHTA which aims to provide a unique set of identifiers for every generic and proprietary drug in use in Oz, integrated into SNOMED CT. Presumably drug information suppliers such as MIMS and APPCo would then add the AMT ID number (which also presumably would be a SNOMED CT ConceptID allocated by NEHTA from the Australian SNOMED CT namespace) to their drug database products, and clinical information system suppliers would add an extra field to their products to record the AMT drug ID number. Then it would be easy to substitute one drug database for another, either within the same system or when transferring data between systems, because they all use teh same drug ID numbers and so on (dose also needs to be resprented consistently, and teh AMT covers that too). I can't imagine MIMS or AppCo or other drug database vendors (are there any others?) being enthusiastic about this, but that's tough. The only fly in this ointment is the fact that after years of effort, NEHTA have only released the specifications for all of this, not the actual terminology - see http://www.nehta.gov.au/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=146&Itemid=139 None of which is of any use to your immediate problem. But that seems to be the plan for avoiding such woe at some indefinite time in the rosy future. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
