AMBEW; a software application for drug assessment in clinical practice

Together with pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic interactions among xenobiotics (DDI) patient inherent health conditions cause major problems under polymedication. One drawback of most available electronic data bases that check the risk for adverse drug reactions (ADR) is the automatic report based purely on information drawn from databases. Such an approach is easy to perform but leads to over reporting, because it does not take into account whether the patient actually will develop or has already developed new symptoms as evidence for ADR.

In close collaboration between clinical pharmacologists, pharmacists, and computer scientists a new internet based platform that supports individualization of drug therapy has been developed and named AMBEW (i.e. “Arzneimittelbewertung”). It provides the needed infrastructure for drug assessment on a case-by-case basis. In the process of creating a patient case the requester is led through the application to assure that all therapy relevant information is taken into consideration. Large and comprehensive pharmacological databases are seamlessly connected to the platform. AMBEW sorts the patient's data and links them to the relevant pharmacological data of the prescribed medication. A unique feature of AMBEW is that all the information is anonymously presented to expert faculty for evaluation. A chatroom allows communication between requester and reviewer providing an option to answer inqueries from both sides. The evaluation is performed by qualified and trained personnel based on their professional expertise. It is returned to the requester as personally signed report. AMBEW presents the basic prerequisite for an evidence-based decision-making in an individual pharmacotherapy.

Supported by Dr. Robert Pfleger – Stiftung Bamberg/Germany