Patient medication notebooks are an effective tool for preventing treatment-associated adverse reactions in patients who go to more than one pharmacy and are treated at more than one hospital.Community pharmacists usually check drugs in prescriptions against patient medication notebooks to reduce the likelihood that patients will receive duplicate treatment or have adverse drug-drug interactions using their pharmaceutical knowledge and experience.
In this study,we examined the usefulness of the prescription checking system in a dispensing fee invoicing computer for checking patient medication notebooks.From a total of 2,776 patients recruited in our pharmacy,1,621 (58.4%) used a patient medication notebook.Fifty-five patients (2.0%) were found to have been prescribed drugs in questionable combinations.Among the 122 instances of questionable combinations noted for these patients,13 concerned duplicate treatment and 109 interactions.Among the instances of duplicate treatment,10 involved treatment with drugs with the same brand name and the rest drugs with the same generic name but a different brand name.Of the 109 cases of drug interactions,14 concerned combinations of medicines that should not be taken simultaneously and the rest combinations of drugs that should be co-administered with caution.Our results showed that application of the prescription checking system in the dispensing fee invoicing computer to the audit of patient medication notebooks was useful for identifying questionable drug combinations.