Prescribing practice in a Swiss primary and secondary acute care hospital.

Questions Under Study: Little is known about the prescribing behaviour of physicians in hospitals. This analysis, using data based on Computerised Physician Order Entry (CPOE), was performed to evaluate prescription patterns, to analyse possible over-prescribing of drugs and to assess the compliance with therapy-guidelines.

Methods: Within a 12 month period, 68,133 prescriptions in three departments were analysed with respect to drug class, duration of therapy, dosage, administration route, patient's age, patient's length of stay and number of prescriptions per patient.

Results: On average, each patient received 12 drugs. A steady increase in the number of prescribed drugs can be seen between the age of 20 and 85. The median duration of intravenously administered antibiotics was 4.0 days, the median duration of antibiotic therapy was 9.5 days.

Discussion: On average, patients were taking 5 drugs on a regular basis on admission to hospital. This number was doubled during the hospital stay where patients were prescribed 12 drugs on average. On discharge 6 drugs were prescribed and thus a reasonable reduction was made. Surgical and Internal Medicine wards were using very similar drug classes. Concerning the use of low molecular-weight heparin, guidelines were widely adhered to whereas proton-pump-inhibitors were prescribed too often and the duration of intravenous antibiotic therapy tended to be too long.