OBJECTIVE This study examined trends in the prescription of antipsychotic drugs in a nationally representative sample of physicians in nonfederal office-based clinical practice during the 1990s. METHODS The authors analyzed physician-reported data from annual National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys between 1989 and 1997 using weighted national estimates of physician visits during which antip...

PURPOSE The Ask Me 3 (AM3) health communication program encourages patients to ask specific questions during office visits with the intention of improving understanding of their health conditions and adherence to treatment recommendations. This study evaluated whether implementing AM3 improves patients' question-asking behavior and increases adherence to prescription medications and lifestyle r...

Correct prescription writing habits could have a great influence on the fate of drug therapy as well as the health of patients. One of the major types of errors in prescriptions is the "errors of commission". In this study attempts were made to examine 519 prescriptions of the internal ward of Ayatollah Taleghani teaching hospital over a period of 3 months in terms of the nature and extent of t...

OBJECTIVE To raise pharmacist awareness about the needs and concerns of our patients with visual impairment and to review useful strategies to foster medication adherence. SUMMARY As patient-centered pharmacists, we need to understand the challenges faced by our patients with low vision and tailor pharmaceutical care to best fit their needs. Evidence-based best practices in labeling and writt...

Background T he last decade has witnessed a dramatic shift in the perception of the safety of opioid prescribing. An initial analysis by the Pain and Policy Studies Group at the University of Wisconsin Medical School1 concluded that the use of opioids in the chronic pain population carried a low risk of abuse potential. They had studied the national utilization of five opioid analgesics used to...

The contents of pharmacist interventions, which were carried out by the ward pharmacists in their routine pharmacy service activities, were sorted and analyzed to evaluate the contributions of pharmacists. In the ward where pharmacists were stationed, there were a total of 196 cases of pharmacist intervention. The prescription was changed in 170 cases, giving a rate of prescription change of 86...

OBJECTIVE To develop and evaluate the acceptability and use of an integrated electronic prescribing and drug management system (MOXXI) for primary care physicians. DESIGN A 20-month follow-up study of MOXXI (Medical Office of the XXIst Century) implementation in 28 primary care physicians and 13,515 consenting patients. MEASUREMENT MOXXI was developed to enhance patient safety by integratin...

When prescribing for the older adult, the office-based physician walks the fine line between introducing the drugs that are considered best practices for each disease that the person has and acknowledging that as the number of drugs increases, the risks of adverse drug reactions, drug-drug interactions, or drug-disease interactions increase considerably. Establishing the clinician-patient partn...