An industry-wide evaluation of drug information services

This study evaluated the responses of 10 pharmaceutical companies to drug information questions on 10 of their drugs via a telephone survey. For each drug, one question addressed the following topics: general information, drug interaction, dosing in special populations, mechanism of action/pharmacokinetics, stability/storage, off-label use, and adverse events. Overall satisfaction with the verbal and written responses was 65% and 70%, respectively. Eighty-four percent of the callers found the written responses useful and 66% found the verbal responses useful. Health care professionals were most concerned with finding an answer to their question and less concerned with call handling. The following best practices were identified: using the caller's name in conversation, repeating the question for accurate understanding, asking more questions to elicit further information, summarizing the discussion and sending timely written follow-up responses. An objective for the pharmaceutical industry is to convert written responses to more useful verbal responses.