Abstract
Conventional printed databases (or manuals) for drug information have unequivocal problems in adding new information, which are critical for drug safety, and in extracting required information from large amounts of data. Therefore, in this study, we developed a problem-solving system of drug information, named “MacDrug”, using HyperTalk on Macintosh personal computers. This system consists of major four functions; organizing various kinds of drug information, converting data sets from other databases, searching and extracting required information under any condition, and analyzing patient compatibility with drugs. All of these functions worked efficiently with the test data, and were shown to be useful in utilizing as much as possible the drug information. MacDrug can be localized in the public domain since the Hyper-Card program is bundled in every Macintosh computer with free of charge. Thus, we believe that MacDrug can help clinical pharmacists manage the advanced and complex drug information in an efficient manner.
