Development and utilization of a drug information system in the Japanese pharmaceutical industry

Pharmaceutical companies are responsible for providing updated, relevant information on the efficacy, safety and quality of drugs to medical professionals and finally to patients. To fulfill this responsibility, we must always endeavour to collect and evaluate the relevant information. We developed a drug information database system called Advanced Medical Online Network of Daiichi (AMOND) to manage various information generated during development of new products and after launch of the products using the classification format for retrieval. This system has been used for 9 years for the purpose of supporting medical representatives who play a primary role in the drug information services in the pharmaceutical industry. This system is incorporated into an on-line network system, and can be directly accessed by more than 1200 people at 11 branch offices and more than 110 subbranches all over the country. We upgraded this system to AMOND-II to improve the function, including retrieval and output abilities. As a result, utilization by users of this system increased six times. We report on the improved system, AMOND-II and our experience of the system.