Background Drug prescription is a complex activity that involves many factors. Improving the quality is very important due to the large health and economic impact of the use of drugs.

Purpose To assess the impact of a program that improves the quality of prescriptions in Specialised Healthcare.

Materials and methods Prospective and intervention study (2009-2011) that compares the outcomes of the main quality indicators of prescriptions one year before and one year after the development of the program. The results were obtained using MicroStrategy^® software, an application where all prescriptions written by specialists for patients not staying at hospitals are registered. The program was implemented throughout 2010. The phases of the program were:

• ▶ Selection of prescription quality indicators (PQI):

• ▶ Indicator-1: Percentage of prescriptions with international non-proprietari names(INN) for pharmaceuticals substances.

• ▶ Indicator-2: Percentage of prescriptions with omeprazole versus all Proton Pump Inhibitors(PPI)

• ▶ Indicator-3: Percentage of prescriptions with Ibuprofen, Naproxen, Diclofenac versus non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs(NSAIDs)

• ▶ Indicator-4: Percentage of prescriptions with simvastatin versus all HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors.

• ▶ Selection of the medical services with the greatest capacity for improvement.

• ▶ Training Sessions: The pharmacy department conducted two training sessions in selected medical services informing about the quality criteria in prescriptions(efficacy, safety, convenience and efficiency)and about which quality indicators should be improved.

• ▶ Design of a quarterly reporting system to inform doctors about the progression of their prescriptions.

Conclusions The design and implementation of an active pharmaceutical intervention program to improve the quality of prescriptions in Specialised Healthcare has improved the outcome of PQI. However, The authors believe that it is necessary to go on following this line of work for further improvement.