DDI-Explorer
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Overview
The concurrent administration of two or more medicines may result in interaction between their components. Such interaction might be of minor, moderate or serious impact on the health condition of patients. 2 – 3% of drug-drug interactions (DDI) reported at a worldwide level has led to life-threatening, and even fatal, consequences. 14 – 16% of the preventable medications error in the US was attributed to mistaken combination of drug substances. Reasons for this state-of-affair in this matter are too numerous to count. Clinical practioners could not be held responsible for this matter since evidence on the interaction might not have been available at hand when medicines were prescribed to their patients. Such practioners are inclined to blame it on the drug information databases for their inability to avail ready access to relevant information on DDIs matters. In a recent survey in Washington DC area, 510 pharmacy shops, employing DDIs software, were asked to identify the likely interactions in seven dummy prescriptions. These systems failed to identify existing DDIs in about 33% of the case despite the fact that official generic names were used to issue the dummy prescriptions. Such performance rating could have been worse if brand names and/or multiple ingredients products were contained in the dummy prescriptions. Controversy on the reason for such shortcomings is still waging. While some put the blame on the information databases, others blame the efficiency of computerized DDIs systems.