Abstract·
Keywords
Report Errors
Background : The role of pharmacists in hospital setting is expanding to include tasks that demonstrate pharmaceutical expertise, such as prescription review, medication consultations, multi-drug management, and multidisciplinary team activities. However, most studies have been conducted on inpatients, and studies on outpatients are limited. In this study, we aimed to examine the role of pharmacists by analyzing the reviews of in-hospital prescriptions for outpatients at a single tertiary hospital.
Methods : We investigated the number of documented prescription reviews, types, departments, and drugs for which frequent prescription reviews were conducted from January 2019 to December 2022.
Results : The average number of documented prescription reviews was 53,266 per year, showing an increase from 47,020 in 2019 to 59,143 in 2022. The proportion of the number of documented prescription reviews to the number of in-hospital prescriptions for outpatients averaged at 12.8%, increasing every year from 11.9% in 2019 to 13.7% in 2022. The prescription review types included drug-drug interactions (33.9%), duplicate prescriptions (31.7%), inappropriate doses (17.0%), renal function (10.9%), patient-centered pharmaceutical service (3.9%), contraindications (1.2%), adverse drug reactions (1.1%), dosage intervals (0.3%), and usage (0.04%). The drugs with the most frequent prescription reviews included tacrolimus (3.9%), cyclosporine (3.8%), quetiapine (3.5%), mycophenolate (3.5%), and sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim (2.8%). The most frequent drugs by the type of prescription review were quetiapine for drug-drug interactions, tacrolimus for duplicate prescriptions, methotrexate for inappropriate doses, mycophenolate for renal function, lamotrigine for contraindications, tacrolimus for adverse drug reactions, lomustine for dosage intervals, and sodium bicarbonate for usage.
Conclusion : The number and percentage of documented prescription reviews by pharmacists in a hospital setting is continuously increasing, indicating that pharmacists are actively reviewing prescriptions for in-hospital prescriptions for outpatients. In addition, this study presented basic data for performing accurate and efficient prescription reviews.