ATTN: NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR NEWS/HEALTH EDITORS
e-Health technology coming to province's community pharmacies

Coming soon to a community pharmacy near you, the Pharmacy Network, Newfoundland and Labrador’s electronic drug information system (DIS), will help to ensure greater patient safety for citizens of Newfoundland and Labrador needing prescriptions filled.

"That's very important for people, no matter where they live in Newfoundland and Labrador," says Dwight Ball, president of the Canadian Pharmacists Association, who's also a community pharmacist in Deer Lake and Springdale. He explains, "Systems like our Pharmacy Network help pharmacists identify the potential for adverse drug events and enable them to better support patients with appropriate use of their medications. The more medical information pharmacists have about patients, the more able we are to make well-informed decisions about a person's individual drug treatment. What's more, the Pharmacy Network will eliminate our province's currently fragmented system of patient information and push progress on implementing our larger e-health technology."

The province-wide Pharmacy Network will hold comprehensive drug information in an interactive database. It will provide clinical information in a secure and private manner to authorized health care providers, connecting pharmacists, physicians, and other authorized health care professionals within a patient's circle of care.

Once it's up and running, the Pharmacy Network's information repository will then set the stage for such e-health technology as a drug-viewer system, and a care-provider web portal, enabling health care providers to have not only access to an individual's comprehensive drug history but also giving doctors the capability of e-prescribing medications.

And once the Pharmacy Network has been implemented in community pharmacies, it will then start to roll-out to province's hospitals, long-term-care facilities and doctors' offices.

Canada Health Infoway (Infoway) and the provincial Department of Health and Community Services have supported the funding of the Pharmacy Network. For more information on the Pharmacy Network visit www.nlchi.nl.ca. You can learn more about the progress of Canada's electronic health record systems from Infoway's Annual Report at www.infoway-inforoute.ca.

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For more information contact:

Dan Strasbourg
Canada Health Infoway
416.595.3424
dstrasbourg@infoway-inforoute.ca