Effect of Clinical Decision Support System and Clinical Pharmacists’ Practice in Preventing Drug-drug Interactions among Inpatients in Bac Ninh General Hospital

Abstract

Drug-drug interaction is one of the drug-related problems that can reduce therapeutic efficacy or increase the risk of undesirable effects. Subjects and methods: interventional study design with before-after comparison. In the pre-intervention period, we retrospectively carried out all electronic prescriptions and medical records of inpatients treated from 01/11/2021 to 31/01/2022. In the post-intervention period, we prospectively performed monitoring reports on the drug-drug interaction warning system and medical records of inpatients from 01/02/2022 to 31/03/2022. Results: The proportion of patients exposed to drug-drug interactions (DDIs) decreased significantly from 4.27% in the pre-intervention period to 3.56% in the post-intervention period (p<0.05). There were no medical records with contraindicated DDIs in the post-intervention period. The percentage of patients for contraindication DDIs with conditions determined to patients with the condition was 39.33% and 27.59%, respectively, in the pre-and post-intervention phases. Medical records rate with major DDIs decreased significantly in the post-intervention period (2.95% vs 3.68%; p<0.05). Conclusion: Clinical decision support systems with drug-drug interaction warnings and clinical pharmacy activities help to reduce the frequency of DDIs. The results show that the combination of these two measures initially brings about effective DDIs management in hospitals.