Automating medications management

The medical community has had to face increasing pressure over the past ten to 15 years. One such challenge has arisen in the area of managing patient medications. A software of particular help in this area is Script Consultant-DM. According to the vendor, the concept behind the program is to integrate the actual prescribing process with drug interaction screening and allergy cross-checking, as well as patient education. The Script Consultant-DM combines a relational data base of pertinent patient data, a clinically useful drug interaction data base and medication data base into an efficient medications management system. Based on the Btrieve database engine, the program can store up to four million patient records. Moreover, the program can be customized to meet individual doctors' needs.