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Contact Information
David R. Buchanan, MD
Section
Head
Section of Social Medicine
1900 W. Polk, 9th Floor
Chicago, IL 60612
david_buchanan@rush.edu
Lisa Stevak, MA, MEd
Section Coordinator
Tel: 312-864-7333
Fax: 312-864-9500
lisa_stevak@rush.edu
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Press Release April 2006
Researchers
at the John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital and the University of
Illinois at Chicago and of Cook County 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 professor of Medicine at Rush Medical School and Bruce
Lambert, associate professor in UIC’s College of Pharmacy, will
collaborate on the project, entitled Formulary Leveraged
Improved Prescribing. The project will create educational tools
to assist hospital formulary committees (an advisory group that
approves medications that can be dispensed at a health care
facility) evaluate the risks and benefits of new medications,
and educate physicians and pharmacists about how to best learn
about and choose those new medications.
“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
enhance the educational value of the formulary committees of
Stroger Hospital and the University of Illinois Medical Center
at Chicago, whose decisions impact more than one million
inpatient and outpatient encounters each year. Proposals for
new medications to be added to the formulary, as well as
criteria for improved medication selections, will benefit from
enhanced reviews led by the UIC Drug Information Center, which
specializes in evidence-based reviews of medication-related
research studies.
Another component of the program will be a multidisciplinary
seminar using reviews of actual applications for new drugs as
case studies. 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.”
Schiff and Lambert will be assisted by: Bill Galanter and Marcia
Edison, UIC College of Medicine; Michael Koronkowski, UIC
College of Pharmacy; and Mary Lynn Moody of UIC’s Drug
Information Center as well as a number of other 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., that resolved
allegations of deceptive marketing, Medicaid fraud and illegal
kickbacks in Warner-Lambert’s promotion and sale of Neurontin.
Neurontin is a prescription medication approved for the
treatment of epilepsy and post-herpetic neuralgia. However,
about 90 percent of Neurontin prescriptions were for other
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. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and her office
was instrumental in securing the settlement from Warner-Lambert.
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