Development and implementation of medication-related clinical rules for obstetrics, gynaecology, and paediatric outpatients.

Objectives: Prescription errors can cause serious adverse drug events. Clinical decision support systems prevent prescription errors; however, real-time clinical rules in obstetrics, gynaecology, and paediatric outpatients remain unexplored. We evaluated the effects of localised, real-time clinical rules on alert rates and acceptance rates compared with manual prescription review.

Methods: We developed real-time clinical rules that incorporate information systems to obtain characteristic information and laboratory values. We conducted a retrospective cohort study to compare the alert and recommendation acceptance rates of all prescription error types before and after clinical rule implementation in obstetrics, gynaecology, and paediatrics. Clinical rules, prescription error types, and alerts were determined by a prescribing review committee comprising physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and administrators. The difference in alert and acceptance rates between the groups was analysed using relative risk.

Results: The number of alerts increased after clinical rules implementation; the number of on-duty pharmacists for review decreased from 10 to 2. Compared with those with manual review, the alert rates for paediatrics and obstetrics and gynaecology increased with the clinical rules by 3.97- and 11.26-fold, respectively, and the alert rates for drug-drug interactions (DDIs) and combined medication errors in obstetrics and gynaecology increased with the clinical rules by 26.10- and 26.54-fold, respectively. In paediatrics, the alert rate for all prescription error types was higher with the clinical rules review than with the manual review; the alert rates for DDI, dosage, and combination medication errors were significantly different between the clinical rules and the manual review. However, there was no difference in the recommendation acceptance rate between the manual review and the clinical rules.

Conclusions: Clinical rules can identify prescription errors that manual review cannot detect and ensure real-time review efficiency in high-volume outpatient prescription settings. The high acceptance rate and modification of prescriptions may be relevant to highly customised and localised clinical rules.