Database Design and Management in a Pharmacokinetic Department

A system automating the flow of information from setting up a pharmacokinetic study through sample processing to pharmacokinetic data interpretation is described. The system was developed to manage the tremendous volume of information and data generated by a department of about 45 people. Over 300,000 samples in 1,000 studies have been processed over the last six years. Utilization of this system has resulted in a dramatic increase in sample throughput and decrease in the report preparation time. The system uses two major user-generated files for this process, a database file created for each pharmacokinetic study and an output file created for each analytical run. Software to run this system has been written inhouse and interfaces with commercial software on the data collection system (HP 335X LAS) and SAS software on an IBM mainframe.