Concomitant use of several drugs by ICU( Intensive Care Unit) patients is often unavoidable. In these patients, pharmacokinetic drug interactions are very likely. The current study was designed to evaluate these interactions in patients hospitalized in an ICU of a teaching hospital in Tehran, Iran. A questionnaire was designed and used to collect study data. The study was done in the ICU of a t...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the incidence of potential drug-drug interactions in an intensive care unit of a hospital, focusing on antimicrobial drugs. METHODS This cross-sectional study analyzed electronic prescriptions of patients admitted to the intensive care unit of a teaching hospital between January 1 and March 31, 2014 and assessed potential drug-drug interactions associated with antimicrob...

Rational prescribing increases the quality of health care and patient outcomes. In this study, the quality of drug prescription in specialist physicians in Isfahan province of Iran was assessed for evaluating the rational use of drugs and improving the therapeutic outcomes.This retrospective survey was conducted on a total of 7999530 prescriptions from all general and specialist physicians. The...

Adverse clinical events related to inappropriate prescribing practices are an important threat to patient safety. Avoidance of inappropriate prescribing in community settings, where the majority of prescriptions are written, offers a major area of opportunity to improve quality of care and outcomes. Electronic medication order entry systems, with automated clinical risk screening and online ale...

BACKGROUND The inappropriate use of drugs due to irrational prescriptions is a common problem in Iran, but there is little evidence of prescription patterns in rural family physicians. This study aimed to explore the prescribing pattern and rational drug use indicators for family physicians using Index of Rational Drug Prescribing (IRDP) in Kermanshah Province, Iran. METHODS In this retrospec...

Background It is essential that pharmacies and prescribers have an overview of each patient’s medication in order to prevent drug interactions, unintentional co-prescribing, unnecessary polypharmacy and underprescribing. We have assessed this overview by measuring the ‘fidelity coefficient’, a measure of the extent to which a drug user has a preference for one prescriber or one pharmacy. Method...

the purpose of this study was to determine the number of prescribed antibiotics being appropriately adjusted and to assess antibiotics with the highest incorrect dosing based on the patient’s renal function according to distinguished guidelines. the study was conducted at a 446-bed university hospital. one hundred and fifty patients admitted through different wards of the hospital were included...

BACKGROUND Dietary supplements (DSs) can be purchased over-the-counter but may also be prescribed by medical personnel for specific therapeutic reasons. Few studies have examined this latter source of DSs despite the fact that 79% of physicians and 82% of nurses have recommended DSs to their patients. This investigation examined demographic factors associated with temporal trends in oral DS pre...

BACKGROUND Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) are very common adverse events in health care delivery settings. The use of electronic pharmacopeias can potentially reduce the incidence of DDIs, but they are often thought to be cumbersome to use. This study is aimed at studying the incidence of potential DDIs in a surgical department, where a limited number of drugs are used in stereotyped combination...