Drug information seeking-behavior among healthcare professionals within the University of Utah Community Clinics

In today's fast growing world of health care, the volume of drug information needed to provide competent care to patients is overwhelming. On average, health care professionals have two informational needs for every three patients seen which are either related to diagnosis or treatment. Therefore, seeking appropriate drug information to answer these informational needs is an important and valuable element of health care. Drug information can be obtained from different sources. Traditional sources like books, journals, meeting with colleagues, physicians' desk reference (PDR) or modern sources like the Internet (Google, Wikipedia), medical databases and medical literature indices. The information so obtained from these sources helps health care professionals to fill the gap in knowledge on new drugs and improve patient care. Therefore, the purpose of this study is (1) to identify health care professionals (HCPs) reported frequencies of use for different drug information sources in the University of Utah Community Clinics to obtain drug information (2) to descriptively find out of if there existed a difference between clinicians and pharmacists in their drug information seeking behaviors. The study design was cross-sectional and utilized a survey questionnaire to capture the drug information-seeking behaviors among health care professionals The Mission Based Survey Management tool was used to send out the surveys. iv The survey response rate was 55%. Clinicians most frequently reported to use drug information databases (46%) followed by personal digital assistants (PDAs) (23%) and electronic sources (18%) while pharmacists most frequently reported to use drug information databases (78%) followed by electronic sources (28%) and medical literature indices (19%). Clinicians were more likely to use PDAs to access drug information than pharmacists which could be due to portability and easier access to drug information via PDAs at point of care. Based on the results obtained from the study, it is reasonable to conclude that when clinicians and pharmacists were given a wide range of sources to choose from to seek drug information, most clinicians and pharmacist preferred to use drug information databases to obtain new drug information as compared to the traditional sources like books, journals and colleagues. Modern and improved technological sources of drug information have taken the place of traditional sources of drug information, reducing health care professionals' trips to the library or to the printed medical journals and books, eventually improving patient care.