The general medical services scheme in Ireland provides free primary health care to low income families and other vulnerable groups. Expenditure on prescription medicine on the scheme is risk-adjusted using a simple age and gender model. This paper extends the number of risk adjusters to include other demographic and socio-economic factors, chronic illness indicators based on the chronic diseas...

BACKGROUND Prescription review by pharmacists prior to dispensing is an important step in an overall strategy for preventing medication errors. Contacts with prescribers may be required to clarify missing, unclear, or inconsistent information. While essential to reduce the likelihood of potential patient harm, clarification contacts are time-consuming for pharmacists and prescribers. The scope ...

Errors occur at all stages of the medication process, starting with inadequate prescribing decisions, followed by errors of distribution and administration of the drugs, failure to identify the right patient, absence of follow-up and inadequate adherence of the patient. Missing information and failure to communicate appropriate information are also relevant factors that can lead to errors. Medi...

Clinicians need an accurate list of their patients’ medications to avoid prescribing errors and provide optimal care. Over time, a patient’s medications will be pre­ scribed by many different providers and dispensed by many different pharmacists, and medication records tend to be scattered. Consequently, clinicians today must gather a medi­ cation history, including both active and inactive med...