Abstract
In Japan, pharmacists are required to instruct patients about the proper use of drugs (since the Pharmacists Act was amended in December 2013). For outpatients who were prescribed medications whose documentation indicated that driving was prohibited, we started performing medication consultations using medication consultation sheets. However, it takes a long time to prepare medication consultation sheets, and they do not contain information about the patient's medication history. In the current study, we tried to develop a sheet preparation system based on Microsoft® Excel that would enable pharmacists to identify any changes in a patient's medication, in order to promote the proper use of drugs. In addition, we assessed the utility of the system by examining the time required to prepare medication sheets using the system, and the usability of the system was evaluated using four questionnaires. The use of the system resulted in the time required to prepare medication counseling sheets reducing from 107 ± 55 seconds to 38 ± 23 seconds, and the resultant sheets categorized the prescribed drugs into “new drugs”, “stopped drugs”, “continuing drugs”, and “restarted drugs”. The questionnaire results were analyzed using customer satisfaction (CS) analysis to determine if there had been any improvement in the pharmacists' views of the system. CS analysis revealed that the readability of the sheets needed to improve, and that easy-to-understand explanations of the sheets' contents were required. In conclusion, we suggest that the abovementioned system is useful for efficiently preparing medication counseling sheets.
