Comparing Drug-Drug Interaction Severity Ratings between Bedside Clinicians and Proprietary Databases

Purpose . The purpose of this project was to compare DDI severity for clinician opinion in the context of the patient’s clinical status to the severity of proprietary databases. Methods . This was a single-center, prospective evaluation of DDIs at a large, tertiary care academic medical center in a 10-bed cardiac intensive care unit (CCU). A pharmacist identified DDIs using two proprietary databases. The physicians and pharmacists caring for the patients evaluated the DDIs for severity while incorporating their clinical knowledge of the patient. Results . A total of 61 patients were included in the evaluation and experienced 769 DDIs. The most common DDIs included: aspirin/clopidogrel, aspirin/insulin, and aspirin/furosemide. Pharmacists ranked the DDIs identically 73.8% of the time, compared to the physicians who agreed 42.2% of the time. Pharmacists agreed with the more severe proprietary database scores for 14.8% of DDIs versus physicians at 7.3%. Overall, clinicians agreed with the proprietary database 20.6% of the time while clinicians ranked the DDIs lower than the database 77.3% of the time. Conclusions . Proprietary DDI databases generally label DDIs with a higher severity rating than bedside clinicians. Developing a DDI knowledgebase for CDSS requires consideration of the severity information source and should include the clinician.