INDICATORS FOR THE AUTOMATED-ANALYSIS OF DRUG PRESCRIBING QUALITY

Irrational and inconsistent drug prescription has considerable impact on morbidity, mortality, health service utilization, and community bur den, However, few studies have addressed the methodology of processing the information contained in these drug orders used to study the qual ity of drug prescriptions and prescriber behavior. We present a compre hensive set of quantitative indicators for the quality of drug prescri ptions which can be derived from a drug order. These indicators were c onstructed using explicit a priori criteria which were previously vali dated on the basis of scientific data, Automatic computation is straig htforward, using a relational database system, such that large sets of prescriptions can be processed with minimal human effort. We illustra te the feasibility and Value of this approach by using a large set of 23,000 prescriptions for several diseases, selected from a nationally representative prescriptions database. Our study may result in direct and wide applications in the epidemiology of medical practice and in q uality control procedures.