Creation of a System to Check Every Patient Registered with Drug Allergies by Pharmacists and its Effect on Patient Safety

Abstract

Electronic medical records register patients with drug allergies and display an alert when the medication is prescribed. Information such as the code for the pharmaceutical must be properly registered for the alert to be displayed; otherwise, the alert may not function and the prescription may be missed. A manual fully instructed users on registering a drug allergy but ensuring proper registration is difficult and remedying improper registration is an issue. To rectify improper registration, a written alert was displayed when a drug allergy was registered, and proper registration improved from 44.4％ to 55.4％. Nevertheless, improper registrations were occasionally noted despite the alert, and further improvements are required. Therefore, this study comprehensively identified registered drug allergies and created a system wherein pharmacists check all registrations and correct the improper ones. Consequently, 19.9％ of the improperly registered drug allergies were corrected, and proper registrations increased to 81.3％. The corrected registrations included medication that could cause serious symptoms such as anaphylaxis, and the displayed alerts may have prevented incorrect administration. Checking and correcting every registration required an average of 10.6 min/day. After the system was implemented, there were no instances of incorrect drug administration to patients with a history of allergies due to improper registration, and the system presumably helped with the proper registration of drug allergies and avoiding adverse drug reactions. In addition, many medical facilities can consider introducing this system without significantly increasing the workload of pharmacists. This system is useful for ensuring patient safety.