How to Use US Drug Labels for Clinical Decision Support
Get access to drug manufacturer information with easy-to-integrate US Drug Labels. Enable safe use and prescription of FDA-approved medications.
Drive safe medication use by integrating customizable drug labels with your clinical support software.
FDA-approved drug labels contain extended, clinically-woven manufacturer product information.
Healthcare providers, patients, and caregivers peruse product monographs, or package inserts, to know when and how specific medications are used and prescribed.
While critical for safe prescribing and use of medication, such information poses challenges:
- Sifting through pages of drug labels information impedes efficiency, when your users need to effectively execute health decisions.
- Users don't need to read all sections of a label. For instance, if you’re running a care platform for clinicians, your users will rely on clinical drug information as compared to patient-driven platforms, where the focus is to educate patients about safe medication use.
- For clinical software developers, integrating new data and tools in a way that aligns with pre-existing product workflows can be time consuming.
At DrugBank, we’re doing more than merely acknowledging these challenges.
We’ve been hard at work building user-focused API modules that capture drug manufacturer information for distinct uses. Not only have we tailored drug labels information for specific uses, we’ve made such information easy to integrate and customize for your brand.
Depending on your use case, we’ve separated drug labels into three modules through our Clinical API:
- Patient Medication Guides
- Health Professional Information
- Supplementary Label Information
Patient Medication Guides
Since most sections of a drug label wouldn’t serve patients, we designed the Patient Medication Guides module with the non-clinical user in mind.
By only including the patient-centric portions of a drug label, we make it easy for you to show the contents of a drug label relevant to your users.
What the Module Solves
Patient labels include instructions for use, possible side effects, when to stop using, when a doctor or pharmacist should be consulted, and general drug safety.
Who Can Benefit
Though it’s applicable to many broad uses, this module is especially useful for patient-facing clinical software, such as patient medical records or consumer health applications. You can provide your users with product information from the drug manufacturer, designed to educate them on safe use of their medications for themselves or their loved ones.
Health Professional Information
Drug labels are extremely informative, but are notoriously long with almost too much information. We’ve not only narrowed down relevant sections of a drug label for busy health professionals, but make it easy to reference them for clinical decision making.
What the Module Solves
For health professionals, it’s important to refer to information such as indications and dosage, warnings and precautions, as well as special populations in medications. We make these sections easy to navigate within the module, enhancing clinical decision support, as a result, reducing decision fatigue and medication administration errors.
Who Can Benefit
The module is indispensable for clinical software with e-prescribing workflows, such as electronic medical records or telemedicine. In conjunction with the Patient Medication Guides or Supplementary Label Information modules, clinicians can provide patients with the information they need, or gather additional details on a drug product from the manufacturer.
Supplementary Label Information
The Supplementary Label Information module does exactly that—it supplements the rest of the drug labels with additional scientific information from the manufacturer, such as pharmacology and toxicology.
What the Module Solves
When combined with the Health Professional Information module, healthcare providers can research in-depth studies conducted on the drug product, such as pharmacodynamics or carcinogenesis. All three modules combined give access to the full versions of all FDA drug labels.
Who Can Benefit
The module allows any clinical software to provide a view or download of an entire label to their users, while being customizable for branding and styling needs.
So while the drug labels modules can’t make clinical decisions for you, they can inform your path.
Take a look at free trials of the module that resonates with your use case—we’re sure you can leverage them for your clinical decision support.
To get started:
Learn more about the US Drug Labels API integration.
Check out more information about our Clinical API product.
Meanwhile, if you need more assistance or information, talk to our sales team to start your integration today!