The Drug Monitoring-Oriented Medical Record: A New Resource for Drug Surveillance

Traditional medical records have been oriented toward drug monitoring by adding a section which lists the drugs and adverse events referred to in the progress notes while respecting their temporal sequence. Simple identification and correlation codes allow the indications for the use of drugs and the diagnostic attribution of all of the adverse events experienced by a patient since the beginning of hospital treatment to be deduced. A file created from drug monitoring-oriented medical records can be used to study prescribing habits and for drug safety monitoring. For drug surveillance purposes, it is possible to apply both the adverse drug reaction reporting system based on doctors' suspicions, as well as the event reporting system which records all adverse events regardless of doctors' suspicions as to their cause.