Objective: To examine community pharmacists' attitudes toward computerized drug-drug interaction (DDI) alerts and identify factors associated with more favorable perceptions of these alerts.
Design: Cross-sectional postal survey.
Setting: 18 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States.
Participants: 3000 community pharmacy managers.
Interventions: 34-item survey instrument designed to collect data about the pharmacy including demographics, workload issues, handling of DDIs, and pharmacists' attitudes toward computerized DDI alerts.
Main outcome measure: Responses to items concerning community pharmacy managers' attitudes toward DDI alerts and factors associated with more favorable attitudes toward these alerts.
Results: A total of 736 usable surveys were returned (25.3% response rate). Pharmacy managers generally disagreed that DDI alerts were a waste of time (mean +/- SD, 2.1 +/- 1.1 on a scale of 1, strongly disagree, to 6, strongly agree). However, they were not completely confident that their computer systems provided them with meaningful DDI alerts (mean +/- SD, 4.5 +/- 1.2). They were confident in their ability to identify DDIs (mean +/- SD, 4.9 +/- 0.9) and discuss DDIs with physicians (mean +/- SD, 5.2 +/- 0.7). Pharmacy software that provided detailed DDI information as well as the ability to customize DDI alerts were associated with more favorable perceptions of DDI alerts.
Conclusion: Despite being presented with a large proportion of clinically unimportant alerts, community pharmacy managers did not believe DDI alerts were meaningless or a waste of time. Incorporation of features that streamline DDI alerts may improve their effectiveness in community pharmacy practice.