JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In North America, though pharmacists are obligated to ensure prescribed medications are appropriate, information about a patient’s reason for use is not a required component of a legal prescription. The benefits of prescribers to including the reason for use on prescriptions has been well documented. Yet, it is not standard practice to share this information with pharmacists, nor is it consistent through the process of designing new tools.

Objective:

To characterize the research on how including the reason for use on a prescription impacts pharmacists.

Methods:

We performed an interdisciplinary scoping review, searching literature from healthcare, informatics, and engineering. The following databases were searched between December 2018 – to January 2019: PubMed, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA), and EMBASE.

Results:

3,912 potentially relevant articles were identified, with 9 papers meeting the inclusion criteria. The studies used different terminology (e.g., indication, reason for use) and a wide variety of study methodologies, including prospective and retrospective observational studies, randomized control trials, and qualitative interviews and focus groups. The results suggest that including reason for use on a prescription can help the pharmacist catch more errors, reduce the need to contact prescribers, support patient counseling, and improve patient safety. Reasons that may prevent prescribers from adding reason for use information include concerns about workflow and patient privacy.

Conclusions:

More research is needed to understand how reason for use information should be provided to pharmacists and how it will ultimately impact collaboration and communication in daily practice. There is significant potential if research is multidisciplinary, and acknowledges the value of clinicians and engineers working together to develop tools to support this.