Joint Commission on Prescription Drug Use

Abstract

It is important to put Dr. Reidenberg’s report and comments about the Joint Commission on Prescription Drug Use into historical perspective for, as was emphasized, the Commission’s existence may have been analgous to an enzyme which catalyzes a number of existing efforts that were already going in the desired direction. As shown in Figure 1, the Joint Commission’s existence has occurred relatively recently, since for several years there had been a number of efforts directed toward collecting the type of information which the Joint Commission felt should be collected and used. It is important to note from this figure that a number of efforts were going on prior and in parallel to the Joint Commission’s efforts, most prominently involving FDA’s and the Department of Commerce’s Experimental Technology Incentives Program (ETIP) interagency agreement to study post-marketing surveillance. The Joint Commission joined in this interagency effort to support the contract; and three publications (Tasks A, B, and have resulted and have provided an overview 191 of existing post-marketing activities. The third publication, Task C, presents one type of plan for a system for post-marketing surveillance. It is important to note that Tasks A and B were incorporated into both the summary and appendices of the Joint Commission report, but, in fact, represent a mutual effort coordinated by the FDA, the Joint Commission, and the Department of Commerce’s ETIP group.