Understanding Patient Needs Regarding Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Smartphone Applications: A Qualitative Insight from Saudi Arabia.

Lamyaa M Kassem,Bushra Alhabib,Maryam Farooqui,Khaledah Alzunaydi

doi:10.3390/ijerph18083862

Abstract

Background: A pragmatic shift in the healthcare sector characterized by moving from curative to preventive approaches highlights the role of pharmacovigilance in patient safety. There have been few published studies on patient reporting of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in Saudi Arabia. This qualitative study aims to explore the community opinions and the need for patient-friendly smartphone applications (SPAs) to enhance their participation in ADR reporting. Methods: Purposeful sampling was followed to recruit study participants, a semi-structured interview guide was used to conduct interviews, and the saturation was reached after the 13th interviewer; no new information was obtained after two subsequent interviews. All the interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed by means of a standard content analysis framework. Results: As per the WHO guidelines, eleven participants were aware of the term “ADR”. All the participants denied receiving any prior education and attending events about ADRs and were unaware of the Saudi FDA-ADR reporting systems. The use of technologies such as SPAs has been widely accepted with a high level of concern for data confidentiality and privacy. Conclusions: These findings point out the need to build patient-oriented educational programs to increase their awareness of ADR reporting and to prioritize the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to be integrated in the Saudi healthcare system to develop future SPAs for improving both patient safety and signal detection of ADRs.

Highlights

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Union recognized the importance of patient self-reporting of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) [1]
The patient ADR reporting system is well-established in some developed countries but has not yet been adopted in most countries including the developing countries [1]
The content analysis of our study revealed that the participants realized the high level of harm that may arise from

Summary

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Union recognized the importance of patient self-reporting of ADRs [1]. Of ADRs was performed only by healthcare professionals; patient engagement is the latest step towards more effective pharmacovigilance (PhV). Patient reporting of ADRs has been described in the literature as a noteworthy resource of collecting new data about the safe use of drugs. A pragmatic shift in the healthcare sector characterized by moving from curative to preventive approaches highlights the role of pharmacovigilance in patient safety. There have been few published studies on patient reporting of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in Saudi. This qualitative study aims to explore the community opinions and the need for patientfriendly smartphone applications (SPAs) to enhance their participation in ADR reporting. All the participants denied receiving any prior education and attending events about ADRs and were unaware of the

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion