Pharmacists have long practiced Drug utilization review (DUR) and understood its value, but since OBRA '90 mandated its use for ambulatory Medicaid patients, other healthcare stakeholders have come to realize DUR's value. Today, not just pharmacists, but pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), health plans, and insurers all employ drug utilization review for everything from ensuring patient safety and containing costs to refining practice guidelines and managing medication therapy for chronically ill patients.
But without a comprehensive and up-to-date drug database, one that is organized to deliver reliable clinical decision support to a wide range of users, drug utilization review quality is compromised. Given DUR's role in so many critical healthcare transactions, that's not a compromise healthcare organizations can afford to make. As the most respected and widely used database in the healthcare industry, First DataBank's pioneering National Drug Data File Plus (NDDF Plus) gives you all the capabilities to do the most rigorous drug utilization review possible.
Preventing Adverse Drug Events and Containing Costs
First DataBank's advantages for drug utilization review begin with the fact that tens of thousands of medical professionals use our comprehensive drug data in real-time to ensure prescribed drug therapies are safe for their patients. One reason we're so widely used is that for over 25 years we've built our products from the ground up to fit within the clinical workflow.
For example, Multiple Access Points (MAPs) are drug identifiers that use industry-standard vocabulary practices that enable you to zero in on First DataBank drug information quickly and accurately within your normal workflow. Our OrderView Med Knowledge Base allows you to check that the physician orders have been transcribed correctly and to quickly incorporate patient-specific factors, such as patient age, weight, and organ function. Our clinical modules for drug-drug, drug-allergy, and drug-food interactions use a range of techniques to reduce alert overload without compromising patient safety. We offer an array of dosing content options that can reduce dose-related medication errors in the workflow. And our drug databases for drug indications, contraindications and side effects further enhance DUR for disease treatment decision support.
Payers use the same real-time capabilities to help ensure prescribers respect carefully devised formularies that encourage lower-priced, clinically equivalent alternatives.
First DataBank is equally powerful for retrospective drug utilization review, especially because MAPs drug identifiers remain consistent, even as coding processes for claims and procedures change. This facilitates clinicians' ability to analyze patient compliance in medication therapy management programs. Similarly, the consistency of our identifiers helps organizations that are refining practice guidelines to track drug therapy incidents using data mining techniques.
Essential Building Blocks
In short, by drawing on the following components, First DataBank sets the standard for providing context-relevant drug information for any type of DUR.
NDDF Plus is the leader in supplying comprehensive coverage of descriptive, pricing and clinical information on drugs. It encompasses medications approved by the FDA, plus commonly used over-the-counter drugs and information on herbals, nutraceuticals, dietary supplements, and medical devices. Comprehensive and up-to-date are the key concepts here, since drug content is dynamic and notoriously difficult to maintain. It's essential, therefore, that the drug database behind DUR be the most reliable in the industry. NDDF Plus is that database. It also offers you the most efficient ways of navigating to exactly the information you need for the task at hand — for more informed decision-making, fewer medication errors and increased patient safety.
Our clinical modules for drug-drug, drug-allergy, and drug-food interactions offer exceptionally flexible ways for you to create applications that categorize and display potentially harmful interactions. First DataBank's expert clinical staff separates the interactions into highly granular categories, and then carefully and consistently reviews each module to create subsets of the most clinically relevant drug interactions. This reduces "noise" that less relevant interactions create, and eliminates the need for clinicians to spend undue time researching.
MAPs are drug identifiers that enable all users to zero in on First DataBank drug information quickly and efficiently within their normal workflow.
Our proprietary Enhanced Therapeutic Classification (ETC) system allows you to quickly find products within therapeutic classes and to revise clinical information at as general or specific a level as necessary.
