Development and Validation of a Trigger Tool for Identifying Drug-Related Emergency Department Visits

There are various trigger tools for detecting adverse drug events (ADEs), however, a drug-related emergency department (ED) visit trigger tool (DrEDTT) has not yet been developed. We aimed to develop and validate a DrEDTT with a multi-center cohort. In this cross-sectional study, we developed the DrEDTT consisting of 28 triggers through a comprehensive literature review and three phase expert group discussion. Next, we evaluated the performance of the DrEDTT by applying it to relevant medical records retrieved from four hospitals from January 2016 to June 2016. Two experts performed an in-depth chart review of a 25% of random sample of trigger flagged and unflagged ED visits and a true ADE was determined through causality assessment. Among 66,564 patients who visited the ED for reasons other than traffic accident and trauma during the study period, at least one trigger was found in 21,268 (32.0%) patients. A total of 959 true ADE cases (5.8%) were identified from a randomly selected 25% of ED visit cases. The overall positive predictive value was 14.0% (range: 8.3–66.7%). Sensitivity and specificity of DrEDTT were 77.7% and 70.4%, respectively. In conclusion, this newly developed trigger tool might be helpful to detect ADE-related ED visits.