Doing the right things and doing things right: Inpatient drug surveillance assisted by clinical decision support

Abstract

Increased budget constraints and a continuous focus on improved quality require an efficient inpatient drug surveillance process. We describe a hospital-wide drug surveillance strategy consisting of a multidisciplinary evaluation of drug surveillance activities and using clinical decision support to augment drug surveillance practices. Key characteristics of the decision support system are the integration of the Dutch national knowledge base (G-Standard), the ability to monitor the effects of drug therapy over time and prevent irrelevant alerting by adding essential patient data to the conventional medication safety checking algorithm. Integration of existing national medication safety knowledge bases into decision support systems assures the availability of up-to-date information, minimises maintenance and prevents irrelevant alerts. Developing decision algorithms based on the desired intervention decreases the burden of validation and maintenance, as duplication of multiple similar decision algorithms is prevented.