Aegate News

Aegate Italia works with pharmacies for citizens safety

Brescia, 9 July 2009. Patient safety communications company Aegate, under the sponsorship of the local associations Fofi and Federfarma will conduct, for the first time in Italy, in the district of Brescia, a pilot project named "Pharmaceutical Care" which involves all 320 pharmacies working in the region.

The initiative offers italian pharmacists, based on the experience in other EU nations, a new tool for patient safety communications, giving - whilst they are dispensing medication - specific and updated information to allow a health education activity and to favour pharmacology treatment compliance, aiming to reinforce and sustain the professionalism of the pharmacist towards the patient and improve his/her ability to better approach the user/patient.

This information comes from a range of medication databases including the products technical data sheet, international data banks or from pharmaceutical companies. The information provided to pharmacists are related to both ethical and non ethical products, para-pharmacy and cosmetics products. Pharmacists, depending on the dispensed product, will receive specific advice in terms of usage of the medicine (regarding treatment compliance, provision, preservation, interactions, already included on the explanatory leaflet, but provided in a short and easy understandable way ) or useful information of changes in real time of dosage, posology, packaging, medicine control alerts. Future developments of the tool for pharmacists will include whilst dispensing - the validation of the expiration date, a really useful working tool.

To assure the information provided is credible and respected, Aegate refers the review of messages to an independent scientific advisory board, which will evaluate the content to be suggested.

For this reason, Aegate's service is a high added value tool which gives the opportunity to create a relationship with the patient and offers to the pharmacist the possibility to promote an additional piece of information, which does not interfere with his/her job, but, on the contrary, facilitates it.

Commenting the project , the President of the local pharmacist association MrsClara Mottinelli, states, "The project has a twofold goal: to solve in an innovative and easy way to communicate health safety issues, such as patient's low respect of therapy, and to improve health education aimed to promote all complementary health fields for medicine dispensing. The success of this project will contribute to create a new, positive and proactive partnership between pharmacies and the pharmaceutical companies".

The exclusive network of Aegate will allow - once extended on a national basis, after the pilot experience in the district of Brescia - to create a direct channel of communication among pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies, category association and institutions to efficiently distribuite in real-time the most updated therapeutic information and those that are useful for the patient safety when dispensing.

In Italy, currently, the new communication channel is already accessible for about the 75% of the national pharmacies who request it; Aegate Italia has already arranged the integration of the service with the main management system providers.

Paolo Migliari, Direttore Generale di Aegate Italia, comments: "Based on the need of italian pharmacies, Aegate can become the ideal partner to optimally link between the pharmaceutical world and the pharmacist, promoting and reinforcing the pharmacist role as an expert advisor for his users/consumers. With the support of the main italian pharmaceutical companies we think this iniziative will demonstrate the high level of assistance that patients/consumers can benefit from through their pharmacist".