Objective: Numerous new drugs have been developed in recent years, making the available types of prescription drugs quite diverse, with increasingly more complex drug interactions.  From an operations support system perspective, hospitals that cannot incorporate a large-scale custom-order system because of financial or use-efficiency limitations have no choice but to rely on commercial products.  However, this leaves many problems unsolved, such as functional restrictions and limited specifications.  In this study, we used Microsoft®Visual Basic®for Application (VBA) to develop an economical drug discrimination system suited to our situation and equipped with original function from the perspective of clinical pharmacists.
Design: System design and development.
Methods: We prototyped the system in VBA and used Microsoft®Excel®to create Query Tables.  The utility of the new system was evaluated based on drug discrimination output and time required in each process.
Results: The new system is capable of inter-database communication and automated data analysis and uses drop-down lists of pre-defined options for data input in many places.  Compared with the conventional method, the new system enabled us to significantly reduce the average time needed to input and confirm data by as much as 61.9%.  This indicates that the new system can considerably reduce the time required for completing time-intensive processes and is also useful in preparing highly precise drug discrimination reports.
Conclusion: Based on the results obtained so far, the new, original system, developed with zero design or development costs, is more efficient and offers more reliable information in the clinical setting than the conventional system.  As a result, we are able to maintain operational quality and reduce the amount of time required for drug discrimination.