BIG DATA ANALYTICS IN PHARMACOVIGILANCE - A GLOBAL TREND

Big data analysis has enhanced its demand nowadays in various sectors of health-care including pharmacovigilance. The exact definition of big data is not known to many people though it is routinely used by them. Big data refer to immense and voluminous computerized medical information which are obtained from electronic health records, administrative data, registries related to disease, drug monitoring, etc. This data are usually collected from doctors and pharmacists in a health-care facility. Analysis of big data in pharmacovigilance is useful for early raising of safety alerts, line listing them for signal detection of drugs and vaccines, and also for their validation. The present paper is intended to discuss big data analytics in pharmacovigilance focusing on global prospect and domestic country-India.

Quality Control in a Medical Information System

Quality assurance techniques provide an opportunity to identify sources of error and to provide the feedback necessary to prevent their repetition. The authors outline an effort to define the steps required for effective quality management procedures in a computerized medical information system (MIS). The computerized management of medical information can be used not only to enhance current quality management activities but also to extend the realm of quality assurance to areas that have heretofore resisted management. Quality-management techniques have the potential for measuring and improving medical decision making processes central to patient care.

Indivisibility and Variety of Medical Informatics

SummaryIn recent editorials it has been pointed out that medical informatics, seen as comprehensive health care informatics, should be understood as the science of information processing and engineering of automated information systems within the health care system.Since the health care system as a whole is the object system of medical informatics, its object of cognition will have to be seen in computerized medical information systems or information systems as components of socio-technical and biological object systems. Because of that and especially in view of the rapidly growing possibilities of data processing technology, the question arises how our discipline can cope with the variety in research and education. This is the subject of this opinion paper.