title: Best practice in therapeutic drug monitoring.
abstract: It is the goal of Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) to use drug concentrations to manage a patient's medication regime and optimise outcome. Limited resources require that drug assays should only be performed when they do contribute to patient management. For this to be the case a therapeutic drug monitoring service has a far greater role than just therapeutic drug measuring. This article describes the roles and functions of a Best Practice TDM service. The features which can and should be strived for in each step of the TDM process-the decision to request a drug level, the biological sample, the request, laboratory measurement, communication of results by the laboratory, clinical interpretation and therapeutic management-are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Royal North Shore Hospital, St Leonards NSW 2065, Australia.
authors.forename: A S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Gross
mesh_terms: D004305:Dose-Response Relationship, Drug; D016903:Drug Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D010599:Pharmacokinetics; D010601:Pharmacology, Clinical