Advancing Pharmaceutical Processes and Tools for Improved Health Outcomes

by Tagelsir Mohamed Gasmelseid

Overview

There has been a growing concern for the improvement of pharmaceutical services provided by healthcare institutions. This concern is also shared by other stakeholders including patients, regulatory organizations, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and research institutions. Advancing Pharmaceutical Processes and Tools for Improved Health Outcomes presents research-based perspectives on the pharmaceutical industry in today's digitally-fueled world. Focusing on technological innovations for pharmaceutical applications as well as current trends in the industry, this publication is ideally designed for use by pharmacists, medical professionals, administrators in the medical field, health insurance professionals, researchers, and graduate-level students.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781522502487
Publisher:	IGI-Global
Publication date:	05/31/2016
Pages:	402
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.88(d)

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Rahmat M. Talukder, PhD, RPh (The University of Texas at Tyler)
Description: This book intends to discuss applications of informatics in improving healthcare outcomes, with a focus on pharmacoinformatics.
Purpose: The objective is to provide an understanding of the tools of health informatics that are applicable to the improvement of health outcomes. Information technology plays a critical role in achieving optimal health outcomes. While the intent is to discuss the application of pharmacoinformatics to improving health outcomes, the content and the depth of discussions of this book will only partially meet the readers' expectations.
Audience: The authors aim the book at graduate students, pharmacists, healthcare professionals, and administrators. However, students and healthcare professionals may find the book of limited use. The contributors are from a variety of universities, but most do not appear to have a familiarity with healthcare.
Features: A wide range of topics are discussed in the nine chapters. Useful topics include opportunities and challenges of web 2.0 tools in pharmaceutical education, information quality issues in the pharmaceutical industry, and the use of pharmacoinformatics in improving patient-centered care. However, the purposes of a few other chapters are not clear. For example, a chapter on the visual ways of learning physical and chemical concepts related to symmetry and crystalline structures has no apparent relevance to information systems. References cited include Wikipedia, never considered a reliable source of information. Professional copyediting is warranted for this book, and the quality of the illustrations could be improved.
Assessment: Readers will get lost trying to find the purpose of this book. A few chapters follow a common thread related to pharmacoinformatics, but others are irrelevant. From the title, it is not clear what pharmaceutical processes and tools the authors intend to cover, and they seem to have some difficulty understanding common terms used in patient care. The primary author has published another book on pharmacoinformatics, which appears to be better organized than this one.

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