ABSTRACT
Background: With the marked changes occurring in the medical field, such as rapid population aging, the frequency of one‐dose package use by medication‐dispensing services is increasing. Pharmaceutical companies promote the development of pharmaceutical products that can be identified based on their color, size, and imprinted information to reduce one‐dose packaging errors and difficulties in tablet identification. However, there have not been any studies about the effectiveness of such measures for aiding the identification of tablets in the clinical setting. Therefore, we examined the effects of imprinting on the ease of identification of tablets and capsules.Methods: The study was conducted over a 3‐month period and involved 39 pharmacists aged under 40. The times they needed to transcribe the characters imprinted on each tablet/capsule were measured.Results: The time needed to identify a tablet was significantly shortened by kana printing (p<0.01), whereas more time was required to identify a capsule when the text color was similar to that of the capsule. The observed transcription errors included ‘inaccurately transcribing alphanumeric characters' and ‘omitting units or other information.'Discussion: These results suggest that kana printing is effective at increasing the ease of tablet/capsule identification, which is also affected by the color of the printed text.
ABSTRACT
<b>Objective: </b>In drug treatment for pregnant and lactating women, pharmacists need to contribute to adequate drug treatment by collecting much information from various sources. However, it takes much time to collect information using plural sources. In this study, we tried to develop a database system which enables expeditiously collecting the domestic and foreign drug use criteria information in order to streamline collecting information for pregnant and lactating women. In addition, we assessed the utility of the database by comparing the time to collect information using the database to that using each information source and the usability by questionnaires.<br><b>Methods: </b>We developed a database system that integrates drug information from the FDA Pregnancy Category, Australian categories for prescribing medicines in pregnancy, “Drugs in Pregnancy & Lactation,” and Japanese package inserts. For assessment of the usability of the database, we assessed the time required to collect information and subjective evaluation using the five-method questionnaires.<br><b>Results: </b>The database significantly reduced the time needed for collecting criteria information and made it possible to compile the information simultaneously from various sources. The questionnaire survey showed that over 80% of pharmacists and students were satisfied with the database.<br><b>Conclusion: </b>It is suggested that our database system is useful to efficiently collect drug use criteria information for pregnant and lactating women.