Evaluation of Reporting Accuracy for the Do Not Use Abbreviations List at VA CMOP

Abstract

Specific Aims: The specific aims of this study are to determine whether the appropriate actions were taken, to quantify how often false positives are released for fill, and determine how much time was spent on false positives. Methods: A retrospective descriptive review of data. Data was provided from the Structured Query Language (SQL) query report that identifies Do Not Use Abbreviations (DNU) from the Joint Commission for pharmacists to review across all seven CMOPs. The report provides data from January 1st, 2019 to June 30th, 2019 containing 5,763 prescriptions for pharmacist review. Main Results: Of the 5763 prescriptions flagged for pharmacist review, 36% contained the DNU abbreviations QD and MS, 31% contained U and IU, and 32% contained trailing or leading zeros. It took on average 12.6 seconds to review each prescription for whether appropriate action was taken by the pharmacist. For each type of DNU abbreviation reviewed, the percent of false positives ranged from 38% to 93%.

Conclusions: Overall there was only a small percentage of the prescriptions reviewed that had inappropriate action taken by the pharmacist. However, pharmacists are spending extra time reviewing prescriptions that may not need review. Several patterns consistently showed up for review and adjusting the query to become more specific and efficient may reduce the extra time pharmacists are spending reviewing prescriptions and increase safe throughput.