Drug Order Entry System with Real time Disease-Drug Check System

Abstract

 A reduction of insurance reimbursements because of the improper or omission of disease name is a crucial problem for every hospital. Many medical facilities check the disease name before submission of receipt. Even after great efforts, however, it is still difficult to completely avoid an off-label prescription at the time of submission.
 We developed a system which checks disease names relevant to the prescription when prescribed. We experimentally started this system in some medications and extended target medications from 2006 and continued with a combination of two commercial drug databases in 2009. Since there is not an official database which codes medicine and its indication, we purchased databases from two companies and combined them together. Though both databases attempt to match the relation between proper drugs with a standard name of diseases, their contents are considerably different. And even after we combined them it is still insufficient to satisfy all the relations. Therefore, there are many complaints from physicians, for example “Some drugs are improperly checked even though they are allowed for the selected diseases by the Ministry of Health and Welfare”. 170,000 checks were announced from August 2009 to March 2010. NSAIDS were most frequently checked.
 Although an introduction of the new software has decreased the assessments, continuous maintenance of the database is necessary.