Recently, the monitoring of prescribed, refilled and reimbursed medical treatment from community or hospital pharmacies has been used (Andersson et al, 2005), a methodology that has been applied in studies targeting BC patients (Nilsson et al, 2006).
Careful and frequent monitoring of prescribed drugs in older adults with at risk comorbidities might prevent readmissions for ADRs.
However, no monitoring of prescribing and perverse incentives encouraging physicians and hospitals to profit from drug procurement encourages irrational prescribing.
All these results indicates a lack of formal continuing medical education and an adequate monitoring of prescribing behaviours provided by public sector.
An essential core to implement antimicrobial stewardship programs is monitoring of prescribing with respect to the guidelines on appropriate use of antibiotics, including information regarding appropriate selection, dosing, route, and duration of antimicrobial therapy [ 15].
Due to the limited number of patients with data past 18 years, it is important that ongoing monitoring of prescribing into later adulthood is undertaken, particularly to observe the effects of recommendations in new guidelines.
Once the monitoring of prescribing by an ICU hospital pharmacist is well established, a ninefold to 13-fold return on investment seems feasible, depending on the mix of medical and surgical patients.
In the European Union (EU), cost-containment measures include external and internal reference pricing, regulatory steering of market access, public tendering, price freezes, cuts and discounts, regulation of profit margins for pharmacists and wholesalers, patient cost-sharing, guidelines for and monitoring of prescribing behaviours, and generic substitution [ 4, 5].
For example, changes in the trends of disease prevalence and comorbidities would require data extraction from sources over long time periods (i.e. years); however, the monitoring of prescribing trends, HRU, or admissions would require narrow extraction intervals depending upon the research question.
One example of enforcement is the monitoring of prescribing of restricted drugs against agreed guidance with additional interventions if required.
POMH-UK invited all National Health Service (NHS) Trusts in the United Kingdom providing specialist mental health services to participate in a QIP focusing on the quality of monitoring of patients prescribed lithium.
