Community pharmacies play a significant role in home healthcare. However, patient information from hospitals is not shared with community pharmacies. We attempted the bidirectional sharing of patient information regarding chemotherapy between hospitals and community pharmacies. We developed a “medicine message board,” which was a modified prescription format. Hospital pharmacists recorded information regarding patients taking tegafur/gimeracil/oteracil (S-1) on the message board. In turn, community pharmacists monitored side effects in the S-1 patients and returned the information by fax to our hospital also using the message board. A medical clerk entered the side effects into the electronic medical record, providing feedback to doctors. We distributed questionnaires to community pharmacies around our hospital between December 2013 and January 2014 and assessed their understanding using a five-point Likert scale (where 1 = insufficiency and 5 = sufficiency). The results showed that the mean scores on understanding about the presence or absence of cancer notification before and after the initiation of the message board were 2.10 ± 1.02 and 4.20 ± 1.06, respectively. The mean understanding about the name of a cancer patient's disease before and after the message board was 2.25 ± 0.91 and 4.45 ± 0.83, respectively. All these differences were significant. Understanding about the purpose of treatment, dose adjustments of S-1 due to body surface area and renal function, administration schedule, presence or absence of combination chemotherapy, pharmaceutical instructions, treatment adherence, and side effects monitoring were also significantly improved in community pharmacies after the initiation of the message board. These results suggest that there is scope to improve the support provided to oral chemotherapy patients by hospitals and community pharmacists.
