Abstract
Drug-related problems (DRPs) such as overdose drug use, drug used without indication, concurrent drug use with possible drug-drug interaction may cause harm to the patients who receive healthcare service at the hospital. Therefore, DRPs are the national burden. Electronic health record (EHR) was widely adopted and used in many hospitals. However, collecting DRPs was not developed and implemented systematically. In addition, categorization of DRPs was not standardized, this could hamper pooling DRPs regionally and provincially. The objective of this research was to develop EHR, which is a part of hospital information (HI) system, to be able to systematically collect DRPs and to standardize categories of DRPs to be user-friendly and can be used in routine work. The committee for EHR and HI development of community hospitals in Ubon Ratchathani Province was met to identify management problems related to DRPs and to gather opinion towards DRPs system. Thereafter, DRPs program was developed and tested to identify any technical problem which was consequentially fixed to make the program more user-friendly and implemented in HI system. The results showed that DRPs management system was different among community hospitals although these community hospitals used the same HI system. Thus, DRPs report was dissimilar. DRPs program developed from the committee’s consensus was user-friendly and appropriated for the routine work. DRPs categories were also standardized. Pooling and reporting DRPs regionally and provincially was reliable and valid. Thus, it is possible to benchmark and evaluate the quality of medical services.
