Prescribing medications with indications: time to flip the script

Drug indications are the link between a drug and the patient. Indications link the evidence-based benefit of a drug for a specific population to a particular patient’s clinical condition. Unfortunately, in prescribing they are more often the ‘missing link’, with explicit documentation of the indication usually missing from the prescription, despite considerable evidence and recommendations (dare we say exhortations) that documenting the indication would make the entire medication use process safer.1–4 Patients want to, need to and have a right to know what each of their medications is for. This issue of BMJ Quality and Safety includes a paper urging incorporation of drug indication into the prescription order, which follows several pieces recently published in BMJ Quality & Safety.5–7 In this case, Feather and colleagues conducted a systematic review and narrative synthesis identifying 21 articles...

Source: BMJ Quality and Safety - May 18, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: Schiff, G. D., Lambert, B. L., Wright, A. Tags: Editorials Source Type: research