Abstract
Pharmacists regularly use test values that are either provided by patients or that are recorded in out-patient prescriptions to identify potential adverse reactions to medications, to verify prescription accuracy (e.g., confirm the dose), and to provide patients with guidance on how to take their medications. However, there are no published evaluations of actual submissions from patients to pharmacies of test results that they received from their medical institutions. We administered a questionnaire and found a strong correlation between the submission of test results to pharmacies and test-result requests from both primary-care pharmacies (odds ratio: 2.4; 95％ confidence interval: 1.5-3.5; P value < 0.001) and general pharmacies (odds ratio: 2.9; 95％ confidence interval: 2.0-4.1; P value < 0.001). Primarycare and general pharmacy requests for test-result reports are useful measures for encouraging patient submission of test-result reports. In the future, non-hospital pharmacists should gain experience in explaining the significance of sharing test values with patients, verifying prescriptions, and helping patients avoid adverse reactions according to their test values, and pharmacists should work hard to change the existing preconceptions of their role in regional medicine. It is important for the patient community to understand that non-hospital pharmacists not only distribute their medicine, but they also play a beneficial role in guiding patientsʼ drug therapies.
