Background and Importance Using fixed as well as broad screening intervals for drug-drug interaction (DDI) alerts leads to an excess of false positive alerts, contributing to alert fatigue among prescribers.

Aim and Objectives We aimed to investigate the effect of tailored screening intervals on the occurrence of DDI alerts.

Material and Methods An interrupted time series analysis was performed to evaluate the effect of a pragmatic intervention on the daily percentage of DDI alerts. The study period consisted of 100 randomly selected days between April 2021 and December 2022. A fixed screening interval of 7 days before and after prescribing a drug had been used to screen for DDIs, until implementation of the intervention. The intervention comprised embedding tailored screening intervals for 27 selected DDIs into the hospital information system. The daily percentage of DDI alerts was defined as the ratio of the number of DDI alerts to the number of new prescriptions per day.

Results During the study period, a mean of 5731 (±2909) daily new prescriptions was created. Daily DDI alerts decreased from an average of 8.6% (±2.2) in the pre-intervention period to 6.6% (±1.4) in the post-intervention period. A significant immediate absolute reduction of 4.5% (95% CI: -6.2; -2.8%, p<0.0001) in the number of prescriptions with a DDI alert was observed, which translated to approximately 258 (0.045*5731) false positive DDI alerts avoided per day.

Conclusion and relevance Defining and implementing tailored screening intervals was feasible and effective in reducing the burden of DDI alerts.

Conflict of Interest No conflict of interest.