Grant Helps UIC, Stroger Hospitals Provide Drug Information
Researchers at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County and the University of Illinois at Chicago have been awarded a two-year $400,000 grant to educate health professionals about the safety of prescribing prescription medications.
Gordon Schiff, director of clinical quality research and improvement in the Department of Medicine at Stroger Hospital and associate professor of medicine at Rush Medical School, and Bruce Lambert, associate professor in the UIC College of Pharmacy, will collaborate on the project. The project will create educational tools to assist hospital formulary committees (an advisory group that approves medications) evaluate the risks and benefits of new medications, and educate physicians and pharmacists about how to choose them.
"This program will provide health professionals with the critical skills necessary to evaluate prescription drug information and industry marketing techniques and to apply this knowledge to their own prescribing practices," Lambert said. "By teaching health professional students to prescribe objectively and strategically in an evidence-based, cost-effective manner, future generations of health practitioners will be better prepared to provide the best possible care for their patients. By offering similar training -- or re-training -- to clinicians in practice, the quality of patient care can be improved."
The program will include a 12-unit curriculum that will be delivered in both a classroom and web-based setting. It will provide educational support to the formulary committees of Stroger Hospital and the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago, Lambert said.
Proposals for new medications to be added to the formulary, as well as criteria for improved medication selections, will receive enhanced reviews led by the UIC Drug Information Center.
Another component of the program will be a multi-disciplinary seminar using reviews of applications for new drugs as case studies, Lambert said. Once the program is completed, a formal evaluation will be conducted by experts in the UIC Department of Medical Education.
"This grant affords a terrific opportunity to help physicians receive more balanced information about new drugs," Schiff said. "By leveraging drug formularies to promote drugs of choice, doctors and pharmacists will have better information and skills to offset one-sided promotional messages in drug ads."
Lambert and Schiff will be assisted by Bill Galanter and Marcia Edison of the UIC College of Medicine; Michael Koronkowski of the UIC College of Pharmacy; Mary Lynn Moody of UIC's Drug Information Center; and a number of physicians and pharmacists at the two institutions.
The $400,000 grant is part of a $435 million settlement reached between the attorneys general of all 50 states and Warner-Lambert, a division of Pfizer, Inc., to resolve allegations of deceptive marketing, Medicaid fraud and illegal kickbacks in the company's promotion and sale of Neurontin, a prescription medication approved for the treatment of epilepsy and post-herpetic neuralgia. However, about 90 percent of Neurontin prescriptions were for indications not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The settlement provided for a $21 million Consumer and Prescriber Education grant program that is supporting the UIC/Stroger project.
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