Development and application of an internet-based educational system to share pharmaceutical case reports between pharmacists

For pharmacists to enhance skill of pharmaceutical cares, it is necessary to learn many instructive clinical cases, which include drug-related incidences and checks of medication errors by pharmacists. However, these cases tend to be kept in each facility and there is no access to the cases for outside pharmacists. Therefore, we aimed to develop an internet-based educational system to gather such cases, append educational commentaries by university staffs, and share them between pharmacists. An exclusive site was set up on the world wide web (WWW) homepage of the Section of Biopharmaceutics, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyushu University (http://seizai.phar.kyushuu. ac.jp) on November 2000. Browsing was limited to registered pharmacists. Any pharmacist can be freely registered. Cases were collected via WWW-forms in the site. After educational commentaries and elucidation were appended, the cases were distributed to the registered pharmacists by e-mails and WWW pages. Many applications for membership have been sent from around Japan to have more than 50 members per month, and many cases have been contributed. These cases were distributed weekly by e-mail magazines. The developed system enabled us to share many educational cases of drug-related problems all over the country. This system could contribute to pharmacists to enhance their skills of pharmaceutical cares.