Doctor shopping for zolpidem appears to be an important issue in Taiwan. Implementing a proper referral system with efficient data exchange by physician or pharmacist-led medication reconciliation process might reduce DSB.

Background Clinical pharmacists must have a complex combination of academic knowledge and practical experience that integrates all aspects of practice. Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare in 2007 launched the Postgraduate Year (PGY) training program to increase the standard of pharmaceutical care. This study aims to develop a pharmacist-specific Chinese-language Mini-Clinical Evaluation Exercise (Mini-CEX) to evaluate the professional development of postgraduate year trainees. Method The specialized Mini-CEX was developed based on the core competencies of pharmacists, published literature, and expert opinion. A pilot test and evaluator workshop were held prior to the administration of the main test. Fifty-three samples were recruited. The main study was conducted at two regional teaching hospitals and a medical center teaching hospital in Taiwan between February and June 2012. The results were analyzed with the kappa statistic (inter-rater reliability) and descriptive statistics, while the Kruskal-Wallis test was used to examine the PGY trainees’ Mini-CEX scores based on their performances. Results Trainees who had recently completed PGY programs (C-PGY) and 2nd year PGY trainees (PGY2) earned excellent scores, while the 1st year PGY trainees (PGY1) earned satisfactory scores in overall performance. C-PGY and PGY2 trainees also performed significantly better than PGY1 trainees in the organization and efficiency domain, and the communication skills domain. Conclusion This study demonstrates the feasibility of using the newly developed pharmacist-specific Chinese-language version of the Mini-CEX instrument to evaluate the core competencies of PGY trainees in clinical settings. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-019-1602-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The multiple linear regressions showed that patients from tertiary hospitals had 105% higher costs than those from primary hospitals (P Ͻ 0.001), and patients from municipalities had 48.6% higher costs than those from prefecture-level cities (P Ͻ 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: The costs per hospitalization associated with DVT or PE events are substantial. Hospitalization costs are now driven predominantly by the cost of drugs, levels of hospitals and cities.

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The results of this study show that integrating appropriate recommendations from drug messages can reduce repeated drug prescriptions. Due to the diversity of diseases, the diversity and accuracy of medical advice must improve. The results of the 'Comprehensive Prescription Information' provided by this system can serve as a reference for future research.