You're right, there is a huge knowledge gap. The bulk of the information about pharmaceutical agents that the average practitioner receives comes from the pharmaceutical industry directly just because of ease and convenience. That's what the drug companies do. That's how they operate.
Our proposal incorporates moving away from that, to provide unbiased, impartial, peer-reviewed material available to a physician when he or she has a clinical problem in front of them and wishes to write a prescription. We provide excellent training for undergraduates in pharmacology and for residents in internal medicine and a whole variety of specialities in pharmacology. Those resources, with a little adaptation, could be made available to physicians who have been in practice for 20 years and haven't crossed the threshold of a medical school in that period.
So the work is there; it is how you deliver this. You can do it on an educational basis. Whilst we don't have a mandate as an association to do that, continuing education for our members is a vital interest. Dr. Shortt here is our new director and assistant secretary general of knowledge transfer, and that's going to be his mandate over the coming years.
In terms of actually writing a prescription in day-to-day office work, you need real-time electronic database access to something as simple in the electronic record as an Agilent. If you write a particular medication electronically for a patient who is, say, under three years old or over 80, and that is not appropriate...and there are such things as the Beers list. The list itemizes and updates the drugs that are inappropriate for the elderly, for example.
So by just incorporating that simple list, if you wrote a prescription for a patient over the age of 80 for a medication on that list, it would stop you at that point and say, “This is worth reconsidering. Is there a better drug you can use?” Perhaps it would even list some better drugs.
These are decision support tools. The pharmaceutical industry, or rather the pharmacists, have gone a long way to providing that network for their members at the dispensing stage, which is really a very appropriate and very easy point to do that. But a vast majority of clinicians in this country still use a paper and pen. Until you get around that and move to a system akin to the pharmacists', and that will speak to the pharmacists, you're kind of stuck with--