Patient drug information at PubMed

November 6, 2007

Starting October 12, 2007, some PubMed users will see links to a drug information resource on over two million citations. PubMed’s AbstractPlus display format includes links to “Patient Drug Information” from MedMaster™; a publication of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), and a new monograph on the NCBI Bookshelf. (For additional information see MedMaster™ Patient Drug Information Now Available from Bookshelf. NLM Tech Bull. 2007 Sep-Oct; (358):e4.)

MedMaster drug information includes brand names and helpful information about the drug. Of the over two million citations with “Patient Drug Information” links, 95% display three or fewer links. Those that have more than three “Patient Drug Information” links will show three links and also have a link that reads “See all # Drug Reports,” which will take you to a Bookshelf page with all the links to drug information that can be explored (see Figure 1.) The links are generated using the drug name searches that are expanded based on regular PubMed mapping, e.g., albuterol will map to “albuterol”[MeSH Terms] OR albuterol[Text Word] and the citations retrieved will include a drug link to MedMaster for albuterol.

The links will initially appear during randomly selected PubMed sessions, therefore not all users will see them. We expect that this feature will be expanded to all users if it proves to be popular.

I don’t like regurgitating information, but the text above says everything you want to know. The original source is here. The figure below is an example of the annotation. As the blurb above mentions, this is being rolled out gradually, so I have been unable to see any drug information myself, yet.

We are reaching a stage when there is a ton of information related to drugs and scientific work associated with those drugs. One can look at the data from many angles. There is the consumer side, interest from medical professionals and interest from scientists. From the scientists perspective it is good to see PubMed providing additional information. I still feel that the presentation format is not the best. But mashups are getting easier. Perhaps what we need is a list of healthcare and life science APIs, which we can then use to create our own mashups and provide information to others (perhaps listed nin the “Sourceforge for science” that Cameron mentions). Certainly some companies are doing that today, either through internal efforts or working with commercial software providers.

Technorati Tags: PubMed, Mashup, MedMaster