Background Prescription fill rates for children being discharged from the emergency department (ED) after asthma exacerbations are low, placing the child at risk for additional ED visits or admissions for asthma. This article describes the implementation of an ED asthma prescription delivery service designed to improve pharmacy prescription capture and decrease ED revisit rates. Methods A cor...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate dentists' prescription writing patterns and their appreciation of the characteristics of antibiotics. DESIGN Evaluation of drug prescriptions written over a six-month period. SETTING Dental Hospital, Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospitals Complex, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. SUBJECTS Retrospective analysis of 313 prescriptions written by dentists attending to outpatient...

Arkansas implemented a primary-care case-management program in February 1994. This study evaluates the program during its first 17 months. Using quarterly data collected for the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), a pooled cross-sectional time series analysis (1991:4-1995:2) estimates the effect of eligibles' program enrollment on expenditure (total, inpatient hospital, outpatient hosp...

OBJECTIVE Investigation of variations in provider performance and its determinants may help inform strategies for improving patient outcomes. METHODS We used the National Heart Failure Audit comprising 68 772 patients with heart failure with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (HFREF), admitted to 185 hospitals in England and Wales (2007-2013). We investigated hospital adherence to thr...

The knowledge of medication errors is an essential prerequisite for better healthcare delivery. The present study investigated prescribing errors in prescriptions from outpatient departments (OPDs) and emergency wards of two public sector hospitals in Lahore, Pakistan. A manual prescription system was followed in Hospital A. Hospital B was running a semi-computerised prescription system in the ...

Objective To assess the impact on adverse outcomes of different antibiotic prescribing strategies for lower respiratory tract infections in people aged 16 years or more.Design Prospective cohort study.Setting UK general practice.Participants 28 883 patients with lower respiratory tract infection; symptoms, signs, and antibiotic prescribing strategies were recorded at the index consultation.Main...

BACKGROUND Patients frequently experience difficulties with medication compliance after hospital discharge. We investigated the effect of a delay in filling a first clopidogrel prescription after hospital discharge on clinical outcomes subsequent to coronary stenting. METHODS AND RESULTS Hospital administrative, community pharmacy, and cardiac revascularization data were determined for all pa...

OBJECTIVES To examine trends and predictors of prescription medications on discharge after first (index) hospitalisation for heart failure (HF), and the effect on all-cause mortality of evidence-based therapy. DESIGN A retrospective multicentre cohort study, with medical record review. SETTING Three tertiary-care hospitals in Perth, Western Australia. PATIENTS WA Hospital Morbidity Data w...

BACKGROUND The Korean healthcare system is composed of costly and inefficient structures that fail to adequately divide the functions and roles of medical care organizations. To resolve this matter, the government reformed the cost-sharing policy in November of 2011 for the management of outpatients visiting general or tertiary hospitals with comparatively mild diseases. The purpose of the pres...