Elearning has occupied a predominant position as a learning methodology all over the world. It’s also being used in the domain of elearning pharma. There is the use of e-learning in the different sub-domains of life sciences which include pharmaceutical and medical devices. Even Biotechnology which includes gene research is a part of this domain. Elearning pharma can be used to make the workers in the pharmaceuticals industry aware of the new requirements imposed by the FDA.

Information about new HIPAA rules

Under the new HIPAA rules imposed by the US government, medical practitioners have to ensure that the information regarding patients is transferred electronically so that unauthorized access is prevented. This includes information regarding their Medicare plans and insurers. Medical Aid is also given by employer-sponsored group plans through an insurer where the salary of employees is deducted to contribute to the health contingencies.

So apart from medical practitioners, entities that reimburse the cost of medical care like insurers have to follow HIPAA patient privacy rules.

But HIPAA rules don’t apply to certain situations.

This rule excludes those health plans where the employer is taking care of the expenses rather than an insurer. Also to be excluded, this health plan must have less than 50 people being a part of it.

Otherwise, HIPAA applies to medical health care plans including health, vision, and dental problems. It also includes health plans in which the long-term expenses of a patient like his nursing-home stay are covered.

Work from home for medical researchers

There has also been much change in the work pattern in the drug industry due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot of employees have been working from home against only 25% in that situation before the pandemic and the pharmaceutical industry is facing problems in conducting trials.

The clinical trials which had been suspended due to lock down are again taking place. Now, digital tools are getting used for remote monitoring of a candidate for a clinical trial.

With remote monitoring of volunteers, it can be seen, how much dosage they are taking and if there is inefficiency and delay in drug consumption. But such databases can be created accurately for every patient when proper e-learning pharma is given to doctors and also trial data can be recorded in an LMS.

Life sciences companies have also been benefiting from this shift to work-from-home. The workers are more productive because they don’t have to take tiring journeys to the office. The drug manufacturing companies took proper initiatives to combat the spread of the disease because they disinfected those manufacturing plants where the Covid-19 sufferers were discovered.

But working from home also had negative impacts on the life sciences industry. Although pharmaceutical companies have been able to manufacture drugs with a lower number of employees in the office, this approach has not been so great. According to 33.3% of employees of such companies, the output of such production was of lower quality.

The e-learning pharma can be used to replicate experiments.

There can be demonstrations shown to the lab workers so that they can learn how to analyze and evaluate data related to experiments.

How to conduct lab trials at home?

Also, the lab trials can be conducted at home with tools available such as online lab simulators. There can be 3D simulations and the doctors can view the results through the software used for such experiments in the simulations. For example, they have a data analysis tool which they can use to evaluate the result of clinical trials like if a certain substance is increased in an experiment would the resulting product be stable or not, and what will be its impact on the human body.

For example, the company can develop software for the blood sample of a Covid19 patient and how can any drug affect the virus. For the development of this software, the company must have done a detailed study of how Corona virus is affected by various substances.

The use of this kind of software which is taught as a part of e-learning pharma is based on artificial intelligence and eliminates the need to recruit human volunteers for clinical trials.

Apart from finding the right candidate depending on age, gender, etc, another problem is that the participants don’t believe that they would be safe in a trial. Also, sometimes, the participants are not studied closely to study the impact of a drug. The candidate dropout rate is also high between successive trials.

How to recruit candidates for drug trials?

A Lifesciences LMS can solve the problem of recruiting candidates for such trials. It’s because, with a database query language, the doctors’ prescriptions and lab reports uploaded to such an LMS can be used to find patients who are apt for a trial.

But doctors often use different medical language to describe the same disease, so it can be troublesome for computer software to find the right volunteer. But an algorithm can be used for this search purpose that makes use of the right keywords related to a disease. However, elearning pharma can focus on teaching such a search-based tool depending on this algorithm to drug researchers. Of course, these doctors can’t be taught a database query language to search records for eligible drug trial volunteers.

So this is how elearning pharma can be useful for Biotech companies.