Emergency Department Drug Orders: Does Drug Storage Location Make a Difference?
Presented in part at the annual meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, May 2006, San Francisco, CA; and at the 11th International Conference on Emergency Medicine, June 2006, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Received 30 May 2006; received in revised form 16 January 2007 and 3 April 2007; accepted 13 April 2007. published online 22 June 2007.
Refers to article:
Studying the Technical Work of Emergency Care
Christopher P. Nemeth, Richard I. Cook, Robert L. Wears
Annals of Emergency Medicine
October 2007 (Vol. 50, Issue 4, Pages 384-386) Full Text |
Full-Text PDF (68 KB)
Study objective
We hypothesize that adding drugs previously only available from the hospital central pharmacy to an existing emergency department (ED) automated medication management system would alter the frequency with which they were ordered.
Methods
A pharmacy database of a large, urban, academic teaching hospital was used to retrospectively calculate changes in drug-ordering frequencies before and after study drugs were added to an ED automated medication management system. Study drugs had been recently added to our ED automated medication management system but were still available from the hospital central pharmacy and were not the subject of changes in hospital prescribing protocols.
Results
Four drug preparations met study criteria: moxifloxacin injection, moxifloxacin tablets, azithromycin injection, and pantoprazole injection. All had large increases (4.0-, 7.2-, 6.5-, and 25.0-fold, respectively) in ordering frequency after addition to the ED automated medication management system. Changes in order frequency strongly correlated with how often orders were filled from the ED automated medication management system rather than the hospital central pharmacy.
Conclusion
Adding drug preparations to an existing ED automated medication management system increased the frequency with which they were ordered, especially when they were most reliably obtained from the system rather than the central hospital pharmacy. Adding drugs to an ED automated medication management system influences physician drug ordering.
aDepartment of Emergency Medicine, Pediatrics, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY
bDepartment of Pharmacy, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY.
Address for reprints: Gregory P. Conners, MD, MPH, MBA, 601 Elmwood Avenue, Box 655, Rochester, NY 14642; 585-463-2942, fax 585-473-3516
Supervising editor: Robert L. Wears, MD, MS
Author contributions: GPC and DPH conceived and designed the study. DPH obtained the study database. GPC performed the data analysis and drafted the article. Both authors contributed to article revision. GPC takes responsibility for the paper as a whole.
Funding and support: By Annals policy, all authors are required to disclose any and all commercial, financial, and other relationships in any way related to the subject of this article, that may create any potential conflict of interest. The authors have stated that no such relationships exist. See the Manuscript Submission Agreement in this issue for examples of specific conflicts covered by this statement.
ABSTRACT