The National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Library of Medicine (NLM) released a BETA version of a tool to help patients and healthcare providers identify medications via its physical properties (e.g., shape, color, imprint) and provide with FDA content consisting of links to medication information and labeling.

Although this tool is not really ready for full-time, clinical use - as evidenced by the disclaimer and the broken URLs - this has the potential to be a very helpful tool, free of subscription fees.

Lastly, I see projects like these as further evidence that the demand for informatics-trained clinicians will far exceed the supply in the marketplace.

he Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) today unveiled the AMCP eDossier System in a partnership with Dymaxium Inc. This powerful electronic dossier system promises to revolutionize the way health care professionals access and evaluate information needed to make evidence-based formulary decisions.

The AMCP eDossier System combines the familiar structure of paper-based dossiers with technologies that are flexible and interactive. The new system allows drug formulary decision makers to easily search and filter through the often overwhelming volumes of information within product dossiers and greatly improves the accessibility of critical evidence

Electronic tools such as this will help in focusing investigators and practitioners towards Comparative Effective Research (CER), for which $1.1 billion was allocated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

"Comparative effectiveness research provides information on the relative strengths and weakness of various medical interventions. Such research will give clinicians and patients valid information to make decisions that will improve the performance of the U.S. health care system"

(http://www.hhs.gov/recovery/programs/os/cerbios.html)