Indicators for the Selection of Ambulatory Patients Who Warrant Pharmacist Monitoring

The development of indicators to identify ambulatory patients who might benefit from pharmacist monitoring is described. With the assistance of an eight-member panel of ambulatory-care pharmacists, six prognostic indicators were identified: (1) five or more medications in present drug regimen, (2) 12 or more medication doses per day, (3) medication regimen changed four or more times during the past 12 months, (4) more than three concurrent disease states present, (5) history of noncompliance, and (6) presence of drugs that require therapeutic drug monitoring. The charts of patients who had visited the internal medicine, general surgery, pediatric, and obstetric/gynecology clinics during five randomly selected weeks in 1985 and 1986 were reviewed to determine the presence or absence of the six prognostic indicators and their adverse outcomes. Evidence of drug-therapy-related adverse outcomes was present in 79 (33.1%) of 239 charts. Charts of patients with a documented history of noncompliance were most likely to show evidence of an adverse outcome. The likelihood that a patient chart would show evidence of an adverse outcome increased as the number of prognostic indicators present increased. The presence of individual or multiple prognostic indicators in the charts of ambulatory-care patients should enable pharmacists to identify patients at greatest risk of experiencing drug-therapy-related adverse outcomes.