The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 275 No 7366 p299
10 September 2005

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New national MI database

Next week sees the launch of a new paperless database that will allow medicines information staff throughout the UK to share answers to queries via a central website.

MiDatabank has been approved by the United Kingdom Medicines Information service (UKMI) as a universal upgrade to existing systems and UKMI has advised that all centres in the UK should move to the new system within three years.

Major providers of current systems, such as DI-Scan and PRACSYS, have agreed that these will no longer be updated and will shortly cease to be supported. Many of the current systems do not allow full enquiry data to be stored electronically and this has prevented sharing of information nationally in the past. The new database will have at least basic compatibility with existing systems so that enquiries recorded using these systems can still be retrieved.

The database has been developed by CoAcS, a software company, in association with UKMI. More information can be found at www.midatabank.com