Risk factors for drug-related problems in a general hospital: A large prospective cohort

To identify risk factors for potential Drug-Related Problems (DRP) at admission in hospitalized patients.

Prospective cohort study conducted in adults patients hospitalized (May 2016 to May 2018) in a general tertiary care hospital in Brazil. Potential DRP were detected by daily review of 100% of electronic medication orders by hospital pharmacists and classified by the Pharmaceutical Care Network Europe classification system (PCNE version 6.2). For the identification of risk factors of potential DRP, backward stepwise logistic regression was used to identify the set of independent predictors among over 120 variables collected in the initial 48 hours after admission in a training set consisting of 2/3 of the study population. The model was validated in the remaining sample.

The study population consisted of 1686 patients aged 52.0+/- 18.3 years-old, 51.4% females, with a median length of stay of 3.24 days, and 4.5% in-hospital mortality. The cumulative incidence of potential DRP was 14.5%. Admission for elective surgery and main diagnosis of disease of the circulatory system were associated with reduced risk of DRP (OR 0.41 and 0.57, respectively, p<0.05). The independent risk factors of DRP are heart rate ≥ 80 bpm (OR 1.41, p = 0.05), prescription of more than seven drugs in day 2 (OR 1.63, p = 0.05), prescription in day 1 of drugs of the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Code (ATC) class A (alimentary tract and metabolism, OR 2.24, p = 0.003), prescription in day 2 of two or more ATC class A drugs (OR = 3.52, p<0.001), and in day 1 of ATC class J drugs (antiinfectives for systemic use, OR 1.97, p = 0.001). In the validation set, the c-statistic of the predictive model was 0.65, the sensitivity was 56.1% and the specificity was 65.2%.

This study identified seven independent risk factors of potential DRP in patients hospitalized in a general hospital that have fair predictive performance for utilization in clinical practice.