Résumé
<b>Objective: </b>Prescription check and inquiry is one of the most important operations of pharmacists to provide optimal drug therapy to the patient. Although a number of studies related to inquiries of prescriptions have already been reported, there is little report about requests for doctor and hospital based on the examples. Therefore, this study aimed to clarify the current problems revealed by inquiries about prescriptions by not only analyzing these inquiries but also investigating requests for doctors and hospitals.<br><b>Methods: </b>We investigated 6,255 inquiries about prescriptions and requests for doctors and hospitals at 584 insurance pharmacies from August 4 to 10, 2014. Then, the inquiries about prescriptions and requests for doctors and hospitals were categorized.<br><b>Results: </b>The most frequent category of inquiries about prescriptions was “Questions about administration and dosage” (21.5%). On the contrary, the most frequent request for doctors was “Efficiency in gathering information from and providing information to a patient” (2,067 cases).<br><b>Conclusions: </b>The present study clarified current problems revealed by inquiries about prescriptions by investigating requests for doctors and hospitals that were based on examples. Furthermore, the problems were classified into ten categories, and these should be noted by doctors and hospitals at the time the prescription was issued.
Résumé
<b>Objective: </b>To examine the usefulness of inquiries made by hospital pharmacists.<br><b>Methods: </b>This study was conducted a survey about the actual condition of inquiries at 5 hospitals.<br><b>Results: </b>The prescriptions subjected to inquiry accounted for 1.5% of the inpatient prescriptions and 0.3% of the injection prescriptions. In cases of “Incomplete entry in the prescription” for the subcategory of “Question about safety,” drug costs without the impact of pharmaceutical inquiries were calculated on the assumption that the concerned drugs should have been generally prescribed. Our results showed that the total savings in medical costs were 30,673 yen for the inpatient prescriptions and 159,212 yen for injection prescriptions, which suggested that pharmaceutical inquiries are effective for saving medical costs for either type of prescriptions. In the case of patients in whom adverse drug reactions (ADRs) might have occurred without prescription changes, medical cost savings realized by preventing ADRs were estimated using the Diagnosis Procedure Combination/Per-Diem Payment System (DPC/PDPS). Our results showed that the savings were 1,428,710 yen for inpatient prescriptions (6 patients), which indicated that a large amount of medical costs was saved.<br><b>Conclusions: </b>Our results suggested that similar to pharmaceutical inquiries made by community pharmacists, those made by hospital pharmacists not only result in the proper delivery of drug therapy but also are useful in terms of medical economics.