J Korean Soc Med Inform.  2006 Jun;12(2):133-140.

The Early Experience of the Implementation of the Drug Allergy Alert System at Asan Medical Center

• Sohn YD
• Lee JH
• Oh BJ
• Kim W
• Lim KS

Abstract

OBJECTIVE
This study was designed to describe how to develop the 'ASAN-Drug Allergy Alert System' and evaluate the usefulness of this system.
METHODS
The drug allergy alert system was developed by a task force that was consisted of emergency physicians, pharmacists, and programmers for ten months. Since this system had been implemented, we compared frequencies with a previous paper based system.
RESULTS
This system was implemented with three stages: an input stage, a censorship stage, and an alertness stage. The input of data was done by physicians and nurses as a multidisciplinary team. The censorship of data was charged of an allergist who confirmed whether a suspicious drug had caused life threatening symptoms or not. If the causative drug was confirmed by an allergist, an alert sign changed 'Code Yellow' to 'Code Red' automatically. After that censorship, an alert sign was noticed to clinicians as a yellow or red colored pop-up window. After an alert system, frequencies per month of report were increased from 44.6 to 594. Also, the report ratio of life threatening symptoms was increased from 5.4% to 12.5% (p<0.001).
CONCLUSION
We assumed that the Asan-Drug Allergy Alert System could reduce medication errors effectively.

Keyword

Medication Error; Alert System; Adverse Event

MeSH Terms

Advisory Committees
Chungcheongnam-do*
Drug Hypersensitivity*
Emergencies
Humans
Hypersensitivity
Medication Errors
Pharmacists