Personalised medicine represents an increasingly used practice using a patient’s biology to guide their treatment. The implementation of personalised medicine possibly increases the quality of health care and life of the patient by minimising side effects and increasing effective
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Personalised medicine represents an increasingly used practice using a patient’s biology to guide their treatment. The implementation of personalised medicine possibly increases the quality of health care and life of the patient by minimising side effects and increasing effectiveness. Personalising medicine can be implemented through a platform which facilitates model-informed precision dosing (MIPD), including various models describing the pharmacokinetics of a specific drug. To make MIPD become clinical practice, wider interdisciplinary collaborations, for example, between pharmacometricians and pharmacists should be studied to learn about their communication and collaboration when using a MIPD platform, and to generate data evaluating the cost–benefit of MIPD in healthcare to motivate professionals to use a MIPD platform. Barriers to implementing these MIPD platforms into clinical practice are not thoroughly studied. However, the functionalities of the MIPD platform should align with the needs of the practitioners as they have to base their dosing regimen on that MIPD platform. As an exemplar for identifying barriers and facilitators of MIPD and corresponding MIPD platforms, this study focuses on the alkylating agent busulfan. Busulfan was chosen because it has a narrow therapeutic index, which often necessitates dosing to a target plasma exposure, while the use of MIPD is beneficial compared to the current clinical practice. Thus, busulfan dosing highlights the importance of using MIPD to improve patient outcomes. Identifying the barriers and facilitators of the MIPD platform, and the interdisciplinary collaboration between pharmacists and pharmacometricians will hopefully give insight on how to stimulate their collaboration and the use of MIPD. This research, therefore, aimed to explore and describe 1) the obstacles in the interdisciplinary collaboration between pharmacists and pharmacometricians, 2) why MIPD platforms are not widely used in clinical practice and what practitioners would need to implement these platforms, and 3) what pharmacists and pharmacometricians need to establish an effective interdisciplinary collaboration using a MIPD platform and thereby create a learning environment. Through conducting a literature research and interviews, collaboration and technology acceptance aspects were studied more in-depth to define the problem and subsequently explore ideas to address this problem. Both disciplines perceived building a connection and keeping their own expertise as important in their collaboration. They also needed their roles in the collaboration and the MIPD platform to be clear in terms of knowing what to expect from the other and how to handle the MIPD platform. Because of these perceptions and needs, we proposed two ways to improve the collaboration and the MIPD platform to subsequently contribute to establishing a learning environment through the MIPD platform. Those two implementations are: 1) the implementation of an introductory course where the disciplines collaborate through the introduction, and 2) tailoring the MIPD platform into two discipline-specific portals, which are based on their skills and tasks. The implementations were tested in interaction through conducting a focus group where pharmacists and pharmacometricians were asked to rank codes retrieved from the interviews on their relevance based on hypothetical scenarios, representing real-world cases. Pharmacists and pharmacometricians perceived connection and trust as important aspects of their collaboration and did expect these to be sufficiently stimulated through the implementation of the introductory course. Regarding the MIPD platform, they perceived the efficiency, in terms of easiness and time-effectiveness in use, as its most important aspect. Thus, efficiency should be ensured in the development of the MIPD platform. To adopt the MIPD platform, it should cover a lot of different patients highlighting the extensive research necessary when building the models within the MIPD platform. To stimulate the implementation of MIPD platforms and the collaboration between pharmacists and pharmacometricians using the MIPD platform, further research should focus on introductory MIPD courses,the MIPD platform design, and including other disciplines in the collaborations around MIPD and MIPD platforms.