Background Pharmaceutical analysis (PA) as a main activity of the clinical pharmacist should be achievable every day. Its implementation is often difficult because of lack of time or dedicated staff. We wanted to show the interest in tracing a complete analysis (CA) of patients’ records (PR) in terms of time saved on the daily analysis (DA) while increasing quality.

Purpose To show that traceability of CA saves time on DA and to determine when all patients will have a CA traced and the time saved.

Material and methods 90 PR were analysed. 60 successive medical records for which DA duration was measured as follows: 30 patient files without CA traced and 30 patient files with CA traced. In parallel, 30 CA were conducted and time measured. The sum and averages were calculated for each situation. The results were recorded from June to October 2016, and extrapolated until June 2017 (based on the previous year’s monthly results).

Results To perform and draw a CA requires on average 9.2 min for a 10.5 line prescription(5.27–14.27). Time spent on QA with traceability was 1.14 mins versus 3.51 min for PR without CA traced for approximately equal prescriptions (10.8 vs 11.7 lines). At an average rate of 2 CA per day, 9 months are enough for 94% of PR to contain a traced analysis. The remaining 6% represent the acute care and follow-up of patients for which medical reconciliation at admission is achieved and traced in the PR followed by a CA if necessary. As soon as a CA is plotted in PR, time spent for DA decreases (92 hou8rs before vs 64 hours after) just as the number of unanalysed prescriptions.

Conclusion This study shows that CA ultimately requires less time while increasing the number of prescriptions analysed if it is systematically traced in PR. The time saved can be redeployed on other clinical pharmacy activities, such as medical reconciliation at entry or discharge, patient’s therapeutic education, etc. This traceability also improves quality and monitoring of patient care and is a first step towards medication review. However, this supposes easy access to patient records and requires complete computerisation.

References and/or acknowledgements SECURIMED 2009French Ministry of Health pp. 47–54.

No conflict of interest