Objective: Many patients in Kagawa University Hospital are administered medicines prepared by the simple suspension method.  Pharmacists in charge of these patients receive inquiries from doctors and nurses regarding the suitability of medicines for the simple suspension method.  Answering these inquiries is complicated and time-consuming as multiple data sources need to be searched.  In order to simplify these complicated procedures, we herein attempted to develop a novel database to provide valuable information that could contribute to the safe performance of the simple suspension method, and evaluated its usefulness.
Method: The specifications of the database were determined by analyzing previously answered inquiries.  To evaluate the usefulness of the database, we used test prescriptions and compared the amount of time required to gather information using the database and the conventional method, i.e., using books alone.  We also analyzed previous prescriptions with the database in order to determine what kinds of problems could be detected.
Results: The investigation of previous prescriptions indicated that some medicines needed to be examined not only for their suitability for the simple suspension method, but also their incompatibility.  Therefore, we added a feature regarding the incompatibility of medicines to the database.  The time required to gather the information needed to answer the test prescription was shorter with our database than with the conventional method.  Furthermore, the database improved the detection of medicines that require particular attention for their properties including incompatibility.  An analysis of previous prescriptions using our database indicated the possibility of incompatibility in half of the previous prescriptions examined.
Conclusion: Our database could rapidly provide information related to the simple suspension method, including the incompatibility of medicines.