Countrywide prevalence of critical drug interactions in Hungarian outpatients: a retrospective analysis of pharmacy dispensing data

BACKGROUND: Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) present a significant source of adverse drug reactions. Despite being one of the commonly cited risks to patient safety, prevention of DDIs still poses a challenge to healthcare systems. The prevalence of DDIs can be used as a quality indicator for the safety of prescribing. With the analysis of drug utilization databases, real-world data on critical DDIs can be obtained. The aim of this study was to establish a list of critical DDIs and estimate their prevalence in the Hungarian outpatient population. METHODS: Since there is no conclusive and generally accepted repository of high-risk DDIs, a systematic search of the literature for consensus-based lists was performed. Based on these results and their analysis with 5 interaction compendia, we propose a simple methodology to identify critical combinations. Present study focused on DDIs which are (1) of high clinical importance thus being most likely to cause significant harm if not detected, (2) well-supported by available evidence and (3) affect drugs which are routinely dispensed in the community pharmacy setting. A retrospective analysis of prescriptions filled between 2013 and 2016 was performed. The source of drug utilization data was the IQVIA’s national prescription fill database. The number of interacting drug pairs dispensed at the same time to the same patient was established. RESULTS: After excluding drugs with low dispensing rates, the analysis covered 39 DDIs. The distribution of risk categories of the analysed DDIs was inconsistent among different drug interaction compendia. The total number of prescriptions filled varied between 173924449 and 176368468 per year. The prevalence of the selected potential DDIs ranged from 0.00 to 355.89 per 100000 prescriptions per year. There was significant variation between how the number of cases had changed for each DDI throughout the study period, no general tendency could have been described. CONCLUSIONS: There were 1.8 million cases of co-dispensing each year, where prescribers’ and community pharmacists’ role in recognizing and managing potentially serious interactions was or would have been critical. The method presented to identify high-risk DDIs can serve as a starting point for the much-needed improvement of routine interaction screening. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s40360-019-0311-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.