A System for Managing Medical and Technical Information

An information management system is described, which enables a pharmaceutical firm to provide rapid and authoritative responses to outside inquiries by professionals, and to meet routine internal literature needs for current awareness and periodic report generation. The system incorporates ongoing monitoring of inquiries, maintenance of focused medical literature files, centralized recording of responses, and widespread access to information through a local area network. Inquiry database summaries are provided to marketing and quality assurance departments to identify emerging concerns of professionals and to identify medical inquiries for which underlying quality control issues might exist. Literature summaries are provided to appropriate personnel on a scheduled basis for preparation of periodic reports of the published literature for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) submission.