[Good prescription practice for out-patients-quality requirements of prescriptions in Germany]. / Gute Verordnungspraxis im ambulanten Sektor - Qualitätsanforderungen an die Rezeptschreibung in Deutschland.

Because the written prescription is a central communication medium between the prescribing physician and the dispensing pharmacist measures to improve the prescription quality are top priorities. While most primary care physicians in Germany use electronic systems, in outpatient clinics and nursing homes and on special occasions such as emergency services and home visits, many prescriptions are still handwritten. Incorrectly and illegibly issued prescriptions impair the physician-pharmacist-patient relationship and thus represent a risk factor in the context of medication safety. Well issued prescriptions expedite the dispensing and thus the continuity of treatment of the patients and spare human resources by avoiding queries and unnecessary steps in the care process. At the same time, legible and unequivocal prescriptions facilitate measures for quality assurance by the dispensing pharmacists and are essential preconditions needed for insurance reimbursement. Probably the most important step to high quality prescriptions is the consistent use of suitable electronic prescription software. This is only possible if physicians are willing to cooperate and understand the significance and benefits of an electronic prescription system.

Development and Pilot-Testing of Key Questions to Identify Patients' Difficulties in Medication Administration.

PURPOSE: The development and testing of key questions suitable to identify patients' difficulties with medication administration. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We used a consecutive five-step process to draft key questions regarding 43 aspects of medication administration that can be difficult for patients who manage a complex drug treatment: Step 1) Identification of potentially error-prone characteristics of drug treatment (such as certain dosage forms) and initial draft of key questions. Step 2) Assessment of how comprehensible the questions are for patients. Step 3) Pre-testing of exemplary key questions with patients and monitoring of patient's actual medication administration behavior. Step 4) Evaluation by general practitioners of how well the questions may be integrated into actual patient visits. Step 5) Final approval of the questions in an expert panel. Thereafter, we pilot-tested exemplary questions with 36 patients (43 tests). In the course of this pilot-testing, the patients' answers to the key questions were tested against both their actual behavior during medication administration and against their answers to more general questions regarding potential difficulties with medication administration. RESULTS: More than half of the key questions (N = 24/43) were revised at least once during the development process. During the pilot-testing, 55.8% of the pilot-tests (N = 24/43) revealed medication administration difficulties. It was observed that the key questions identified significantly more difficulties (N = 17) than the general questions (N = 8; P = 0.021, positive predictive value = 94.4% vs 88.9%). In one case, both a key question and a general question identified difficulties, which, however, was not confirmed during the drug administration demonstration, indicating a false positive rate of 5.3% in both cases. CONCLUSION: We developed key questions aimed at detecting administration errors with a high specificity and a significantly higher sensitivity than general questions, suggesting that the resource-intensive demonstration of medication administration can be reserved for the detection of rarer and uncommon administration errors.