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. 2001 Mar-Apr;41(2):200-4.
doi: 10.1016/s1086-5802(16)31230-x.

Performance of community pharmacy drug interaction software

T K Hazlet  1 , T A Lee, P D Hansten, J R Horn
Affiliations

Performance of community pharmacy drug interaction software

T K Hazlet et al. J Am Pharm Assoc (Wash). 2001 Mar-Apr.

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the performance of computerized drug-drug interaction (DDI) software in identifying clinically important drug-drug interactions.

Design: One-time performance test of computer systems using a standard set of prescriptions.

Setting: Community pharmacies or central corporate locations with pharmacy terminals identical to those used in actual pharmacies.

Participants: Chain and health maintenance organization (HMO) pharmacies with seven or more practice sites in Washington State. A total of nine different DDI software programs were installed in 516 community pharmacies represented by these chains and HMOs.

Main outcome measures: Sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values of software in detecting 16 well-established DDIs contained within six fictitious patient profiles.

Results: The software systems failed to detect clinically relevant DDIs one-third of the time. Sensitivity of the software programs ranged from 0.44 to 0.88, with 1.00 being perfect; specificity ranged from 0.71 to 1.00; positive predictive value ranged from 0.67 to 1.00; and negative predictive value ranged from 0.69 to 0.90. For software packages that were installed at different locations, between-installation differences were observed.

Conclusion: The performance of most DDI-detecting software programs tested in this study was suboptimal. Improvement is needed to advance their contribution to detection of DDIs.

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