Thursday, March 18, 2010

A dream

dear friends,

we all know India is a poor country & on top of that huge population spread over vast land has further compromised
health care delivery to masses. my idea of creating a software like "prescrioption pad"
was to facilitate quality health care to masses at grass root level through this software i have tried to equip
a treating physician with latest knowledge about drugs,
brands,
diagnostic workup for a disease & their evidence based treatment modalities
so that even with bare minimum professional degree/ qualification he
is able to diagnose & treat a patient fairly well. as every one knows no well qualified doctor wants to go to
remote villages and so these villages are full of quacks or under qualified doctors through this software one can
even send make e-consultation with his seperiors if he has internet connection through which he can send patients
details along with his photographs taken by webcam of any digital camera. i think by such software i can improve
health care delivery at remote places & help general masses.

dr. Anil vij

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Medical treatment

Dear friends,
in my earlier blog i had given introduction to the software i have developed in the last few years. in fact the idea came to my mind in year 1982 when i shifted to delhi and my next door neighbour was a computer professional. during light conversations i came to know that computers can very easily handle comparative studies. so at that time it struk me that why not we arrange signs & symptoms of each and every disease and make a database which should be compared with the presentation of patient's sign & symptoms and at the end of it computer can give us some possible diagnosis. that was the first time when this idea struk me. at that time computers were very costly & i had just started my practice & could not even think of spending a single penny on this type of venture. after almost 15 yrs of practice when i could establish good practice in Delhi i started working on this all by myself. i consulted soem computer professionals & was advised to work on Dbase to develop this kind of software. i learned Dbase and i 2 yrs time made some scrach of software which could compare signs & symptoms of patients with the disease database & could give out first 10 possibilities on percentage bases. one day when i was seeing some thing in the utility one of my patient came to consult me along with his son who was software developer. he saw me working on Dbase programme and was very impressed with the idea and offered his help to develop it into a really world class software. that is the day since when we started working seriously for such quest. it took us three years to develop our first version of the software which we launched in year 2003. it was taken up by doctors very well with huge appreciation. seeing the scope of the software and the possibility that it could help doctors write fool proof prescriptions we delved further in the development and have produced a master piece which has no parallel in the world.
we are going to put demo version of the software on our website and i invite you to download it and see yourself its working & usefulness.
i would certainly wait for the comments.

thanks
dr anil vij

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

My Experience - Dr. Anil Vij

I am a practicing physician, M.D., Medicine from Kanpur medical College, India, having my own nursing home in Delhi. It had been my long cherished dream to develop a software which could be called as clinician’s companion in true sense & help them in every respect to write a safe, fool proof & first rate prescription. After 10 years of hard work I think the dream has become reality now with the development of a prescription writing software called “PRESCRIPTION PAD”.
Prescription writing is not merely putting few drug names on a piece of paper rather it is an art which can be attained only after years of experience, hard work & sound knowledge of the basic subject. World over, there is stress on evidence based medicine which can be described as “the conscientious, explicit & judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions”. Professional organizations & government agencies are developing formal clinical practice guidelines in an effort to aid physicians & other caregivers in this endeavor. These guidelines can provide a useful framework for managing patients with particular diagnosis or symptoms. The challenge for the physician is to integrate into clinical practice the useful recommendations offered by the experts who prepare clinical practice guidelines without accepting them blindly or being inappropriately constrained by them.
A report from the Institute of Medicine, USA concluded that “to err is human” but called for an ambitious agenda to reduce medical error rates & improve patient safety by designing & implementing fundamental changes in health care system. Accordingly it is the responsibility of hospitals & health care organizations to develop systems to reduce risk & ensure patient safety.
We have designed our software on these general guidelines. The software at the moment has a database of more than 40,000 brands with full prescribing information, full information about nearly 24,00 drugs with their complete monographs to backup, information about 1500 diseases , their differential diagnosis, investigatory workup, many treatment guideline & protocols & other important pointers along with patients education material. The software automatically checks for drug interactions & drug safety for children & elderly, pregnancy, lactation, liver insufficiency, renal insufficiency, pulmonary insufficiency & gives you warning in case of any untoward effect. The software has capability of giving you useful pointers also from time to time while writing prescription. The software checks for the drug safety at the individual disease level too e.g. it gives you warning if any drug is not safe to give in PORPHYRIA or G6PD disease or in diabetes. In this way the software tries to ensure that you give out 100% safe, first rate & fool proof prescription to a patient by providing you all the related information automatically.
The complete details of the software features can be seen on the website www.prescriptionpad.in.
Drug interactions & drug safety is major issue in prescription writing especially in multi-organ diseases where large number of drugs are prescribed. In such situations this software can be very useful.
I am giving some common examples of drug interactions in day-to-day practice :

Ace inhibitors with Aspirin Reduces hypotensive effects of ace inhibitors
Quinolones with Nsaids CNS excitation
Eltroxin with Iron Poor absorption of Eltroxin
Zinc with Iron & other minerals
Quinolones,
Tetracyclines Poor absorption
Antacids with Antibiotics Poor absorption /chelation

The usefulness of the software is realized only when you start using it & I am sure it would encourage more & more clinicians to use computers & may change the in day-to-day practice : Ace
inhibitors with Aspirin Reduces hypotensive effects of ace inhibitors Quinolones
with Nsaids CNS excitation Eltroxin with Iron Poor absorption of Eltroxin Zinc
with Iron & other minerals Quinolones, Tetracyclines Poor absorption Antacids
with Antibiotics Poor absorption /chelation The usefulness of the software is
realized only when you start using it & I am sure it would encourage more & more
clinicians to use computers & may change the way doctors write prescription in
future.


Regards

Dr anil vij