Electronic prescriptions are supported as a means to reduce adverse drug events, but the ambiguities and overspecificities of prescription semantics along with their lack of standardization reduce adoption, limit interoperability and are potential sources of error. Ontologies in the OBO Foundry, founded on realist methodology, have been successful in fostering the logical, scientifically accura...

Drug therapy is the most commonly used method of any disease treatment in general practice. However, the patterns of drug prescription are often inappropriate and the need for registration and evaluation of these patterns is essential in an effort to improve prescription standards. Cross sectional retrospective study was used. Prescriptions were selected by using simple random sampling techniqu...

BACKGROUND The safety and effectiveness of psychotropic drug use in the paediatric population is widely debated, in particular because of the lack of data concerning long term effects.In Italy the prevalence of psychotropic drug prescriptions increased in the early 2000s and decreased afterwards. In such a context, a study with the aim to estimate the incidence and prevalence of psychotropic dr...

BACKGROUND Assessment of patterns of drug to detect performance problems and compliance with standards facilitates objective comparisons and impact evaluation. Children are at higher risk of consequences of irrational prescribing and antibiotic misuse. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was to evaluate the prescribing pattern and utilization of antibiotics for children using standard prescr...

Monitoring national patterns of antihypertensive drug therapy is essential to assessing adherence to treatment guidelines and the impact of major scientific publications on physician prescribing. We analyzed data from 2 US National Ambulatory Care Surveys to examine trends between 1993 and 2004 in the prescription of antihypertensive drug classes for uncomplicated hypertension and the associati...

Monitoring national patterns of antihypertensive drug therapy is essential to assessing adherence to treatment guidelines and the impact of major scientific publications on physician prescribing. We analyzed data from 2 US National Ambulatory Care Surveys to examine trends between 1993 and 2004 in the prescription of antihypertensive drug classes for uncomplicated hypertension and the associati...