Identifying an important drug interaction

The goal of policy makers in requiring the use of e-prescribing is to improve medication safety.  Many systems have the ability to screen a new prescription for safety using clinical decision support tools such as drug interaction, drug allergy, duplicate therapy and dosage range checking.  A recently published study by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) analyzed the use of e-prescribing in physician practices and the impact on patient care.  The study included 24 practices and found that while most e-prescribing systems used had access to patient medication information and clinical decision support tools built-in, only slightly more than half of the physicians reported accessing this information.  Several reasons were cited for this low usage including the fact that it is difficult to import medication histories into the patient records and that physicians found little value in reviewing this information when making prescribing decisions.

The results of this study raise some interesting questions.  The challenge of incorporating patient specific medication histories from multiple sources certainly is a real barrier and one that is pivotal to making CDS useful.  Maybe more alarming is the perception that the alerts and checks that the system can provide are not useful in influencing prescribing decisions.  This point can be challenging when e-prescribing systems are not built with reliable and clinically relevant data to power the CDS processes.  

Lexicomp provides clinical information that can be used to perform key CDS functions such as drug interaction, drug allergy, duplicate therapy and dosage range screening.  This content is derived from our well-established drug reference information that is evidenced-based, peer-reviewed and up-to-date.  If you are a clinician working in health care, you most likely have relied on this content to help you make patient care decisions for many years.  If CDS is going to accomplish its goal of improving patient care, it is going to require a strong, evidenced based library of clinical information.  Something Lexicomp has been doing for over 30 years.