The pressure is mounting for physicians to adopt electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) systems. Everything from government regulation and industry initiatives to the economic and clinical demand for greater practice efficiency is forcing physician groups to look anew at e-prescribing options.
Despite these pressures, many doctors still need to be convinced that e-prescribing systems will yield the promised benefits — ranging from dramatic reductions in medical errors to lower costs and higher levels of efficiency within the physician's workflow.
Recently, numerous healthcare organizations have recommended requirements for clinical decision support (CDS) in e-prescribing. Some of their recommendations highlight what it will take for physicians to fully embrace e-prescribing. Among the most important elements is a comprehensive and up-to-date drug database that facilitates CDS and optimizes usability, while connecting readily with all of the systems that physicians interact with.
First DataBank's
National Drug Data File Plus (NDDF Plus) meets—and often exceeds—these recommendations.
Enhancing Usability and Clinical Decision Support
Successful e-prescribing systems must facilitate faster and easier order entry, optimize dosing efficiency, and streamline alert messages without compromising patient safety.
To support these goals, First DataBank's
Prescriber Order Entry Module (POEM) incorporates convenient, easy-to-use pick lists of common prescriptions for adults, specific to the drug formulation and intended route of administration. It also enables e-prescribing systems to filter prescriptions based on known patient information, such as medical conditions.
Our
Drug-Drug Interaction Module also supports patient safety and ease of use with its highly flexible severity levels and filtering parameters that allow you to set the level of alert and drill down where desired. Similarly, our
Drug-Allergy Module quickly identifies drugs known to cause clinically significant allergic reactions, alerts users to cross-sensitivities and documents drug intolerances. It provides a convenient, pre-defined pick list — a set of drug concepts that makes drug allergy screening faster and more convenient.
Fostering Connectivity and Interoperability
It's also important that First DataBank drug databases have been and continue to be a consistent element throughout the e-prescribing universe — from retail pharmacies to physician practices, pharmacy benefit managers, health plans, and employers. More than just a testament to our reliability and industry reputation, this broad presence facilitates connectivity and interoperability, key benefits as healthcare relies increasingly on electronic technology.
More specifically, by using our drug vocabulary,
Multiple Access Points (MAPs), users can zero in on First DataBank drug information quickly and efficiently within their normal workflow, thus smoothing the movement from prescription to claim to pharmacy dispensing. In addition, many of our identifiers are cross-referenced to RxNorm within the National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), and our data complies with JCAHO and ISMP guidelines for addressing errors that stem from confusing or ambiguous abbreviations, acronyms and symbols.
Essential Building Blocks
In short, by drawing on the following components, First DataBank sets the standard for providing context-relevant drug information for any type of e-prescribing system.
NDDF Plus is the leader in supplying comprehensive coverage of descriptive, pricing and clinical information on drugs. It encompasses medications approved by the FDA, plus commonly used over-the-counter drugs and information on herbals, nutraceuticals and dietary supplements. Comprehensive and up-to-date are the key concepts here, since drug content is dynamic and notoriously difficult to maintain. It's essential, therefore, that the drug database behind e-prescribing applications be the most reliable in the industry. NDDF Plus is that database. It also offers you the most efficient ways of navigating to exactly the information you need for the task at hand—for more informed decision-making, fewer medication errors and increased patient safety.
POEM allows your system to incorporate a convenient, easy-to-use pick list of clinically valid dosage prescriptions specific to drug, route of administration and medical condition. In addition, by creating links to clinical context parameters, you can make prescriptions specific to patient variables, such as age and organ function, thereby reducing the leading category of medication errors. And by starting with a set of pre-stored prescriptions that we create and maintain, you can avoid the time and expense of building such databases yourself—or requiring your customers to do so.
Our
Drug-Drug Interaction Module offers exceptionally flexible ways for you to create applications that categorize and display potentially harmful drug-drug interactions. Expert clinical staff separates the interactions into highly granular categories, and then carefully and consistently reviews this module to create subsets of the most clinically relevant drug interactions. This reduces any "noise" that less relevant interactions create, and eliminates the need for clinicians to spend undue time researching the probability of a potential interaction.
The
Dosage Range Check Module monitors the appropriateness of drug dosing, using patient-specific age, indication and organ-function data when available. If patient-specific data are not available, you can still view a dosage range that consolidates the usual range for common indications for the specified drug. This module screens against thousands of dispensable drug products. It enables your system to check a dose against low, high or maximum values, and to recommend a dosage range for the drug being considered.
Our
Neonatal and Infant Dosage Range Check Module draws on the expertise of experienced pediatric clinical pharmacists. It offers specialized drug-dosing information for this population, while complementing our adult dosing modules. This range check content accommodates the narrow therapeutic window for neonates and infants. It helps prevent dosing errors in these patients by factoring in critical data such as weight, gestational age at birth and medical condition when available. Medication screening covers those drugs most commonly prescribed for newborns in an acute-care setting.
Our
Patient Education Module is a critical component of our drug databases that support consumers. It provides authoritative content in everyday consumer language. This extensive collection of monographs has been in use since 1986 by very discerning critics—the pharmacists and point-of-care professionals who rely on our monographs to support efforts to educate patients.