An Informatics Approach to Assess Pediatric Pharmacotherapy: Design and Implementation of a Hospital Drug Utilization System

Drug utilization in the inpatient setting can provide a mechanism to assess drug prescribing trends, efficiency, and cost‐effectiveness of hospital formularies and examine subpopulations for which prescribing habits may be different. Such data can be used to correlate trends with time‐dependent or seasonal changes in clinical event rates or the introduction of new pharmaceuticals. It is now possible to provide a robust, dynamic analysis of drug utilization in a large pediatric inpatient setting through the creation of a Web‐based hospital drug utilization system that retrieves source data from our accounting database. The production implementation provides a dynamic and historical account of drug utilization at the authors' institution. The existing application can easily be extended to accommodate a multi‐institution environment. The creation of a national or even global drug utilization network would facilitate the examination of geographical and/or socioeconomic influences in drug utilization and prescribing practices in general.