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Know More About Methods of Pharmacovigilance

This article was genuinely published here and copied with permission.
Pharmacovigilance is the work of checking the safety and efficacy of medications borne out of clinical trials. Clinical trials are done to create medicines and vaccines for various diseases and viruses, but it’s normal for clinical trials to produce drugs with adverse effects or too many side effects. An increase in Pharmacovigilance Courses can be attributed to the high demand for clinical trials and clinical data management around the world. There are many methods of pharmacovigilance –

1) Individual Case Reports

Individual case reports deal with the harmful effects of drugs and report it to the national medical association of that country. An individual case report brings up concerns about the adverse reactions of a drug. A person working in the field of pharmacovigilance is expected to be skilled enough to find the causal relationship between medicinal products and adverse events, they do this by documenting and noting down the characteristics of the medicinal product or the adverse event. This method accounts for many factors like the time course and withdrawal effects of the product.

2) Clinical Review of Case Reports

Whilst a lot of the reports are submitted to pharmacovigilance systems, not all reports are submitted like this. A lot of reports are even published in journals. Clinical review of case reports isn’t as laborious and time-consuming as an individual case report but comes with its own set of setbacks, which is common among all pharmacovigilance methods. A detailed clinical review is important to gain useful knowledge and helps professionals seek out information in ways that other methods can’t and this relies on computational methods to maximize efficiency. Studying and completing Pharmacovigilance Courses Online helps young medical professionals grow more acclimated to this method.

3) Cohort Event-Monitoring

To put it simply, cohort event monitoring is a more intensive follow-up of selected medicinal products and is usually implemented to complement individual case reports. This method ranges from over ten thousand patients and this helps in reporting adverse effects and finding out information that may have gone unreported in any other method. This method helps professionals compare incidence rates among all medicinal products which give the medical community a clearer understanding of the efficacy of the product. Perfecting these methods is difficult and Company Connect Consultancy aims to make this as easy as humanly possible with its extensive range of courses that help build the future medical community of India.

4) Longitudinal electronic patient records

Longitudinal electronic patient records cover large populations and provide important and detailed information on the patients, exposed and unexposed. The information procured from this method is usually prescriptions, laboratory test results, hospital admissions, hospital referrals, and the inclusion of symptoms, signs, and diagnoses of these patients. Despite covering large populations of patients, this method also provides anonymity as patient data is extracted digitally and in a way that doesn’t violate the privacy of anyone involved. Just like the other methods in this list, this method also has a few cons like not specifying any medical or clinical concerns as effectively as other methods.

5) Screening patient records

Patient records have always been a practice in the medical community, regardless of clinical trials, management, and pharmacovigilance. Although, over the years, pharmacovigilance has taken advantage of existing medical records and used them to analyze and survey the effects of the drugs without it being a laborious task. While most methods only specify a single concern, screening patient records allows medical experts to detect and address many potential concerns.  

Conclusion

Pharmacovigilance continues to prove its importance and is one of the most important career fields, not just in the medical industry, but important on a global scale. As people become more cautious of diseases and the effects of medicine, the need for pharmacovigilance has just gone up.