Comprehensive Description of an Automated Drug Dispensing System Database

Nina L Wittwer,1,2 Christoph R Meier,1,2 Martin J Recknagel,3 Samuel Allemann,1,* Cornelia Schneider1,2,* 1Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland; 2Hospital Pharmacy, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland; 3Medifilm AG, Oensingen, Solothurn, Switzerland*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Samuel Allemann, Pharmaceutical Care Research Group, University of Basel, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Klingelbergstrasse 50, Basel, 4056, Switzerland, Email [email protected]: Medifilm is a company that blisters drug therapies recorded by pharmacists in the Medifilm software. The Medifilm dataset collates this information and provides details on drug substances, dosages, pharmacotherapy duration, the sequence of therapies, as well as demographic data on the patients. This article aims to provide an overview of the database, to describe the contents, and to demonstrate possibilities for researchers. The database and the recorded information were described. Furthermore, the data coverage was characterized in terms of the number of available pharmacies, patients, and their drug regimens. The database has been recording data since 2013 and has registered 470,801 blistered therapies for 45,594 patients ordered by 441 pharmacies so far. The longitudinal nature of the database allows researchers to study drug utilization, including medication changes, initiations, and discontinuations over time.Keywords: medication blistering, drug therapies, medication changes, drug utilization, polypharmacy