Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 23, 2026

High-throughput Identification of Synergistic Drug Combinations by the Overlap2 Method
Published on: May 21, 2018
Performance of community pharmacy drug interaction software
T K Hazlet1, T A Lee, P D Hansten
1Department of Pharmacy, School of Pharmacy, University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7630, USA. thazlet@u.washington.edu
Objective:
To evaluate the performance of computerized drug-drug interaction (DDI) software in identifying clinically important drug-drug interactions.
Design:
One-time performance test of computer systems using a standard set of prescriptions.
Setting:
Community pharmacies or central corporate locations with pharmacy terminals identical to those used in actual pharmacies.
Participants:
Chain and health maintenance organization (HMO) pharmacies with seven or more practice sites in Washington State. A total of nine different DDI software programs were installed in 516 community pharmacies represented by these chains and HMOs.
Main Outcome Measures:
Sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values of software in detecting 16 well-established DDIs contained within six fictitious patient profiles.
Results:
The software systems failed to detect clinically relevant DDIs one-third of the time. Sensitivity of the software programs ranged from 0.44 to 0.88, with 1.00 being perfect; specificity ranged from 0.71 to 1.00; positive predictive value ranged from 0.67 to 1.00; and negative predictive value ranged from 0.69 to 0.90. For software packages that were installed at different locations, between-installation differences were observed.
Conclusion:
The performance of most DDI-detecting software programs tested in this study was suboptimal. Improvement is needed to advance their contribution to detection of DDIs.
Related Concept Videos
Combined Effects of Drugs: Antagonism
The most common type is receptor antagonism, where one drug acts as an antagonist to block the effects of another drug by...
Combined Effects of Drugs: Synergism
Such synergistic combinations...
Pharmacokinetics: Drug–Drug Interactions
Pharmacokinetics: Drug–Food and Drug–Viral Interactions
Drug Dosing: Geriatric Patients
Drug toxicity: Drug–Drug Interaction

