©© 2007 American College of Clinical Pharmacology, Inc.
The Journal of Clinical Pharmacology
, 10.1177/0091270007304105
An Informatics Approach to Assess Pediatric Pharmacotherapy: Design and Implementation of a Hospital Drug Utilization System
Athena Zuppa 1*,
Sundararajan Vijayakumar 2,
Bhuvana Jayaraman 1,
Dimple Patel 1,
Mahesh Narayan 1,
Kalpana Vijayakumar 2,
John T. Mondick 1,
and
Jeffrey S. Barrett 1
1 The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
2 INTEK Partners Inc
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: zuppa{at}email.chop.edu.
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Abstract |
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Drug utilization in the inpatient setting can provide a mechanism to assess drug prescribing trends, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of hospital formularies and examine subpopulations for which prescribing habits may be different. Such data can be used to correlate trends with time-dependent or seasonal changes in clinical event rates or the introduction of new pharmaceuticals. It is now possible to provide a robust, dynamic analysis of drug utilization in a large pediatric inpatient setting through the creation of a Web-based hospital drug utilization system that retrieves source data from our accounting database. The production implementation provides a dynamic and historical account of drug utilization at the authors institution. The existing application can easily be extended to accommodate a multi-institution environment. The creation of a national or even global drug utilization network would facilitate the examination of geographical and/or socioeconomic influences in drug utilization and prescribing practices in general.