Development And Application Of An Electric Medication Record System For Clinical Pharmacists

Objective:To explore and develop the information management system of clinical pharmacist medication records; to test the applicability of the system based on the actual conditions of clinical pharmacists from different majors in medical institutions; to explain the importance of this system used in the pharmacists' daily work; to form a more complete theoretical system and a more practical electric medication record system. The system is designed to achieve three goals:first, to achieve real-time, accurate, comprehensive grasp of various important information related to patients' drug treatment in the health institutions in order to provide necessary information support for clinical pharmacists. Second, to control the medication risks and enhance patients' medication alert. Third, to standardize the workflow of clinical pharmacists and improve the efficiency and quality of their work.Methods:The system design includes two aspects:creation of the background database and data maintenance, and design of front-end application programs. System back-end database was built using Microsoft SQL Sever 2000. We established five basic excels in the database, including general conditions of patients, medication logs, pharmacist consultation, discussion of critical cases and total price of drugs. The front-end operating platform was built using PowerBuilder 9.0, including the following modules:system permissions set, the original data entry, data summary, inquiries and maintenance. Based on the comprehensive HIS system, we established and connected to the database, finally formed a rational, structured and highly integrated information system. The system undergone unit testing and integration testing during the research and develop process. It was preliminarily tested in the actual work of clinical pharmacists from three different majors. We built 120 electric medication records and analyzed them retrospectively in the end.Results:By docking with hospital HIS system, it could directly read patients' clinical information and laboratory examinations information to achieve automatic generation of hospitalizations, doctor orders, electric medical records, laboratory examinations, etc. The system is managed obeying "patient-centered, drug treatment information-based line". We can achieve dynamic monitoring of patients' medication process and warning of patients' medication risks. The "hard" nature of the system design significantly improved the efficiency and quality of clinical pharmacists' work. The system provides custom data maintenance, so clinical pharmacists could increase or decrease the options of pharmaceutical care, focusing monitoring drugs, assessment of patients' initial treatment and so on. They could also adjust and combine these information at any time according to their majors to meet the needs of their actual work. The query function provided by this system could complete drug treatment-related statistics and provide necessary files for clinical pharmacists to carry out teaching and research.Results:1.The system database has a certain integrity, consistency and security. The operating platform could provide perfect applications and functions, showing reasonable man-machine interface, easy operation and strong practical.2.The system standardizes the workflow of clinical pharmacists, changes the mode of hand-written medication records and improves the efficiency and quality of their work significantly.3.The data constant could be maintained to meet the needs of clinical pharmacists from different majors.4.The set of drug warning enhances the pharmacovigilance role of clinical pharmacists to reduce patients' medication risks. 5.The medication records of clinical paths are managed in classes to promote pharmacists' role in the clinical pathway.6.There was no failure resulted from the database system, suggesting that the function and performance of the system is good.