The pharmaceutical industry uses a variety of techniques to promote its products to clinicians, including gifts and free food, advertisements, and detailing by company representatives. Although manufacturers might argue that drug promotion supports physician education, which in turn leads to more informed prescribing, studies have shown that greater contact with drug sales representatives is as...

BACKGROUND Differential access to basic health information may contribute to persistent cervical cancer disparities. We examined whether human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine awareness, HPV knowledge, and use of information sources about the vaccine differ by sociodemographic characteristics associated with cervical cancer. METHODS Study participants (n = 889) were caregivers of adolescent girls...

This analysis examines the policy issues involved in the removal of sugar from paediatric medicines. It reports a study which investigates the perspectives of professionals, consumers, and the pharmaceutical industry. Interviews were conducted with: parents of children receiving long term medication, dental professionals involved in influencing policy or caring for such children, and drug compa...

OBJECTIVE To determine the impact of the European Union's Clinical Trials Directive on the number of academic drug trials carried out in Denmark. DESIGN Retrospective review of applications for drug trials to the Danish Medicines Agency, 1993-2006. REVIEW METHODS Applications for drug trials for alternate years were classified as academic or commercial trials. A random subset of academic tr...

Lurie and colleagues’ comparison of FDA letters not approving applications for new drugs and associated public announcements from sponsors provides a valuable but rare peek behind the Food andDrugAdministration’s “iron curtain.” The discussion section begins, “our analysis found that the FDA’s reasons for not approving marketing applications for new molecular entities are not being fully convey...

Extracting medication information from clinical records has many potential applications and was the focus of the i2b2 challenge in 2009. We present a hybrid system, comprised of machine learning and rule-based modules, for medication information extraction. With only a handful of template-filling rules, the system’s core is a cascade of statistical classifiers for field detection. It achieved g...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate whether the quality of pharmaceutical company representatives' (PCRs) visits to hospital pharmacists can be improved by written communication of the results of an evaluation of their visits. METHODS Pilot study with prospective evaluation of overall visit quality and strength of request for adding drugs to the hospital formulary, and of the scientific quality of product...

A drug company wants to investigate the uniformity of one of its products. It has 2 Sites at which the drug is manufactured. From each site three Batches are obtained at random. From each batch 5 samples (pills) are taken at random. The samples are analyzed for Content. One issue is whether the two sites differ; another is whether batch-to-batch variability within the two sites is a significant...

In recent years, LSTM-based sequence-to-sequence model have been applied successfully in many fields, including short text conversation and machine translation. The inputs and outputs of the models are usually word sequences. However, for a fixed-size training corpus, a word sequence or even part of it is unlikely to repeat many times, thus in natural, data sparseness problem could be an obstac...