Article Text
Abstract
Background The information and communication technologies’ (ICT) tools are the instruments that allow the pharmacist to evaluate quickly and easily the patient’s therapy identifying potential drug interaction (DI) and medical errors, in order to lead a medication reconciliation (MR).
Purpose Identify the perfect-matching ICT tool in order to lead a MR for patients with chronic kidney disease.
Material and methods Three patients with a pill burden higher than 10 therapeutic units were selected and their therapies were analysed in four (A, B, C and D) pre-selected ICT tools commonly used in the hospital pharmacy. ICT tools were compared, based on the number of drugs that were allowed to be inserted, kind and number of DI that were found such as drug-drug (DDI), drug-food (DFI) and drug-alcohol (DAI). Differences between the tools were analysed.
Results The tool A was excluded due to the limit of up to 10 drugs that can be confronted and does not use data from an international database. For these reasons the study was performed only on the other three tools that allowed the comparison between more than 30 drugs. The tool C consented to identify just DDI, so was excluded, instead with tools B and D DDI and DFI were funded. No tool identified DAI. Tools B and D consented to save the therapy and interaction data sheet, but only tool B allowed the extraction of the data. The chosen software was tool B because it was the only tool that include an alert with information regarding the dosage over that there is a DDI, that was important for patients with chronic kidney disease. Besides that, no tool consented to calculate DI based on the used dosage.
Conclusion The choice of the accurate ICT tool based on the study population is the first fundamental step to start and quickly implement an efficient and appropriate medication reconciliation process.
References and/or acknowledgements No conflict of interest.