Key performance indicators for the assessment of pediatric pharmacotherapeutic guidance

Given the paucity of actual guidance provided for managing pediatric drug therapy, prescribing caregivers must be able to draw on the limited published information in pediatrics and/or guidance provided in adults with some account for expected pediatric response. Guidance for managing drug therapy in children is clearly desirable. Our objectives were to construct key performance indicators (KPIs) for pediatric pharmacotherapy guidance to identify drugs where pharmacotherapy guidance would be most beneficial. A pilot survey to assess variation in caregiver appreciation for pediatric dosing guidance has also been constructed to provide a complementary subjective assessment. Three KPI categories, drug utilization (based on hospital admission and billing data collected from 2001 through 2006), medical need, and guidance outcome value along with a KPI composite score have been proposed. Low scores are favored with respect to prioritization for pharmacotherapy guidance. The pilot survey consisted of 15 questions to assess 1) physician knowledge regarding dosing guidance, 2) attitudes toward dose modification and patient individualization, 3) the accessibility, ease of use and appropriateness of existing data stores, and 4) frequency of dosing modification, consultation of dosing compendiums and estimate of success rate in dosing guidance. Pilot results suggest that dosing guidance is generally viewed as important and that the existing resources are insufficient to guide recommendations for all drugs. While the majority of respondents check more than one resource less than 25% of the time, at least 25% of the respondents check more than one resource 25-50% of the time. The majority viewed the relevance of dosing guidance very important to the management of drug therapy. The questionnaire is being extended to the primary care centers, the Kids First Network and specialty care centers. Results will guide the development of decision support systems (DSS) that provide patient-specific pharmacotherapy guidance as part of our pediatric knowledgebase initiative. For the top 25 most utilized agents at our institution over the last 6 years, KPI score ranged from 35 (dexamethasone) to 77 (cefazolin and ampicillin) with an average score of 55. Prototype DSS for tacrolimus and methotrexate are strongly supported by the KPI scoring which ranks their selection in the top 5% of drugs on formulary. KPI metrics provide an objective means of ranking agents for which pediatric pharmacotherapeutic guidance is clearly needed.