Information System for Pharmaceutical Management using medicine-related problems classification

Chronic conditions impact on health systems is becoming more and more important as approximately 10% of patients receive 70% of total health system costs. Life expectancy increase is pushing up chronic conditions prevalence and thus patient polypharmacy treatments. Consequently, DRP percentages are rising up. To face this new front, health systems are setting policies in order to manage related clinical and economical aspects. The Conselleria de Sanitat de la Comunitat Valenciana (CS, the regional public health system belonging to the regional government of the Spanish eastern region with 5.2M people) launched a program in order to review treatments of more than half million patients with polypharmacy including more than 5 drugs in order to check them were adequate. This was called REFAR program. More than 22.000 patients in specialized care, 300.000 patients in primary care and 4.500 patients in geriatrics are under review at the moment. In the operation of the program were involved primary care, hospital and geriatrics clinical staff supervised by pharmaceutical staff. The starting point of the program was a data mining analysis in data hosted in both the regional electronic health record and computer prescribing order entry databases. These two systems are the main result of the health information technology program called Abucasis launched by the CS ten years ago.