EN Use of Mobile Apps in Haemovigilance Safety Surveillance

Use of Mobile Apps in Haemovigilance Safety Surveillance

The increase in use of smartphones and other mobile devices has presented an opportunity for National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) and Haemovigilance Centres to collect safety reports directly from healthcare professionals and the public.  

Web-based forms and mobile devices offer a platform for developing real-time haemovigilance systems that can enable near-instantaneous transmission of patient safety information at the point of need, and potentially improve health outcomes. 

A number of NRAs and pharmacovigilance centres in Africa, and in Europe, have started using mobile applications to collect adverse drug reactions for their pharmacovigilance programmes. Current or in-use mobile apps were designed to facilitate instantaneous reporting of suspected adverse reactions directly to NRAs by healthcare professionals and the public. They also provide for timely communication of medicine safety information from the NRAs to healthcare professionals and the public. The mobile apps can function without active internet connections, and allow for reports to be partially completed and saved for completion later. Transmission of reports to the NRA or the pharmacovigilance centre can be made immediately or when the user has better connectivity. For pharmacovigilance, the mobile apps have been integrated to the global medicine safety database VigiBase for ease of transmission of country reports to the global medicine database. 

These same mobile apps can be customized to include haemovigilance reporting for countries that already have access to this platform. Mobile apps can be used to allow for easy and fast reporting of adverse reactions and adverse events from use of blood products.  

‘Recommendations on the Use of Mobile Applications for the Collection and Communication of Pharmaceutical Product Safety Information: Lessons from IMI WEB-RADR’.

https://link-springer-com.proxy.library.uu.nl/article/10.1007/s40264-019-00813-6