The increasing complexity of decision-making in clinical practice and the financial pressure requires clinicians to develop some background about the economic consequences of their decisions and to become more and more managers of pre-defined budgets. The present work aims at describing a simple technology solution that could support prescription decisions and illustrates the results of a preliminary assessment of the tool in a sample of professionals. The solution has been developed to allow informed decision-making in the prescription of oral anti-diabetic drugs (OADs) in type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients by supporting prescriptive appropriateness.

The tool developed is compatible with many kinds of hardware architectures and the most diffused web browsers. The system allows real-time reproduction of economic evaluation of the different therapeutic options for the management of T2DM patients. Assessment of “ease to use” and “usefulness” of the tool was performed in a convenience sample of clinicians and pharmacists through a specific questionnaire.

The tool was developed to compare dipeptidyl-peptidase inhibitors (DPP4i) with sulfonylureas, as second line therapy, for T2DM patients. The tool has a user-friendly Graphical User Interface allowing users to quickly and easily select the therapeutic options to compare, choosing geographical context, perspective of analysis, and changing some model parameters. Feedbacks obtained from thirty-three different professionals were generally positive for the “ease to understand information offered”, “ease of introduction of the tool to support usual working activity”, “usefulness within the usual working activity”.

The study showed that the introduction of the tool as a support for clinicians in optimizing their practice could satisfy unmet needs of professionals by supporting informed prescriptive appropriateness in the choice of OADs as it allows to consider diabetes drug related costs in a comprehensive way. The routinely use of the tool developed could become a solution helping clinicians in the management of several diseases.