title: Information on medication history--basis for improved prescribing.
abstract: The spectrum of applied pharmaceuticals, often interactive, persistently expands. In modern therapeutics, patients receive more and more drugs, cases of simultaneous administering of more than 10 different drugs are not seldom. The majority of drugs are prescribed by personal physicians, the rest by the secondary level service specialists, doctors on duty, doctors at the release from the hospital etc. Furthermore, patients keep in stock drugs prescribed in the past. In the Slovene practice of medication prescribing, a major setback is poor information linking between the doctor and the pharmacist, as well as between doctors at different levels of service. Thus, doctors have often raised the issue of timely and accurate informing on the administered drug. This issue became even more pressing upon the implementation of the scheme of substitutable drugs in 2003, allowing the pharmacist to substitute the prescribed drug for an equivalent less expensive one.The paper outlines a project headed by the Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia (Institute) to facilitate the recording of issued drugs on the card. The information on drugs received by a patient in the past will in this way become readily accessible to the prescribing doctor as well as to the administering pharmacist. This objective requires a range of tasks to be completed: business/operational design of the system, introduction of a uniform drug information scheme at the national level, adjusting the functions of the health insurance card system, upgrading the software environment at the health care service providers, training doctors and pharmacists in applying the new information, and ensuring data security in conformity with regulations.
authors.affiliation: Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
authors.forename: Martina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zorko
authors.forename: Marjan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Suselj
mesh_terms: D011307:Drug Prescriptions; D006801:Humans; D007348:Insurance, Health; D010595:Pharmacists; D010820:Physicians; D055553:Prescription Drugs
chemical_list: D055553:Prescription Drugs