Home Forums Discussions General Discussion drug interaction/warning checks

Leaving aside any regulatory/reimbursement requirement to use the alert function of AC, does anyone know of a way to make it actually useful, or foresee some method of having it be helpful? There are obviously lots of ways I could hope this would be of benefit, but having to respond to alerts telling me that HCTZ and lisinopril may interact to lower blood pressure is not among them. I have my alerts turned off, since even at the lowest setting they are filled with endless inane and obvious drivel, but it would be awfully nice if they could be useful. I'd really like something like an "unusual but important" setting that avoided the obvious or those things demonstrated in lab rats but of minimal clinical significance.

I like your idea though I think it will be quite some time before we see anything that is clinically useful.

It flags a warning if pretty much any patient is on two psychotropic medications of any kind. I think it probably is much like what the pharmacists use. It assumes complete prescribing ignorance and if anything, I think it opens physicians up to new risks from a medical-legal sense because our medical chart now indicates that we have been informed of every drug interaction known to man and computer.

It would be cool to have a specialty specific checker that was smart and assumed some prior expertise.

Yep someone decided to set the interaction gun to wide scatter guess the thinking is 'including everything shows competence/responsibility' and we are left with the choice of turning it off, ignoring the warnings(and thereafter forever digitally recorded we 'knew' about it and did nothing), or read them and comment in the plan how we reviewed the warnings and decided benefits outweighed risks for this patient(something I do although rarely). Wonder how many have made a template saying such and include it in the plan whenever a med is prescribed?