Access to a Pharmaco-therapeutic Guide (PTG) is fundamental for any hospital or healthcare center and their staff who work with the medications every day.
Due to the size of the pharmaceutical market – with approximately 3500 active principle drugs and up to 23,000 commercial presentations – at hospitals it is necessary to make an appropriate and rational selection of medications in order to reduce the number of available medications to a suitable size.
The Sociedad Española de Farmacia Hospitalaria (Spanish Society of Hospital Pharmacies, SEFH), notes that a PTG should be easy to use and its content should be complete, updated, rigorous and concise. In summary, any PTG should be considered by the prescriber and healthcare staff as a useful tool that quickly and simply answers consults in an efficient manner.
The experience of the Virgen de los Lirios Hospital in Alcoy
The public Virgen de los Lirios Hospital in the Alcoy area – Valencian Community, Spain – had for some time been looking for an application that could be implemented to work with the hospital’s information systems and allow staff to obtain quick and complete information from a Pharmaco-Therapeutic Guide.
“For several months the hospital has been using Vidal Vademecum’s medication information system and, from my own experience, this web application is very suitable to the center’s needs,” said Inmaculada Segui, an adjunct pharmacist and the Head of the Outpatients’ Pharmacy Unit (UFPE) at the Pharmacy Service of the Virgen de los Lirios Hospital and the Department of Health of Alcoy.
For hospital pharmacy services, the greatest benefit that the tool has to offer is the ability to access general and specific information about medications. “I would say that the most notable function of the system is the PTG administration, which is especially useful for pharmacists at the hospital, and the Therapeutic Exchange Programs (TEP) included in the application,” she said.
The specialist also emphasized that professionals value the fact that they have access to weekly updated information about medications at all times. “To us it is important that the application makes it possible to consult administrative information about the drugs, and that it is also linked to clinical information,” she added.
Greater security in the use of drugs and time savings at the hospital
“The investment that the hospital has made on choosing a medication information system is worth it as the implementation of the resource has led to improvements in both the quality and security of medication management as well as saving time, especially when resolving doubts about pharmacological treatments,” Segui concluded.
Challenges: the generalization of use and the integration of the system at centers’ administration systems
In spite of the advantages offered by these medication information systems to healthcare professionals at hospitals and healthcare centers, the incorporation of these tools into working systems at the clinics is still slow, whether because of unfamiliarity with the resources or because Pharmaco-Therapeutic Guides are still put together manually.
Another of the major challenges for the industry is to achieve the integration of the medication information systems with the drug management software installed at hospitals.
As the Spanish Society of Hospital Pharmacies (SEFH) states in its objectives for 2020 – which provides strategic guidelines for the improvement of hospital and healthcare system pharmacy practice – incorporating technology is fundamental to improving the organization and quality of the Pharmacy Service.
In addition, the SEFH seeks to achieve the goal of 80% of hospitals having an electronic assisted prescription service by 2020: this system must be connected and/or integrated with the clinical record and should include medication information databases to support clinical decision making.
