Evaluation of the Collaboration System between Community Pharmacies and Hospital for the Management of Oral Anti-cancer Therapy Using Information Sharing Tools and Team-based Learning

Abstract

We have established a collaboration system between community pharmacies and our hospital using the sharing tools of patient information such as tracing reports and continuous training sessions by the team-based learning method. In this study, we evaluated the clinical effectiveness of this collaboration system in patients treated with oral anti-cancer drugs as adjuvant chemotherapy for gastrointestinal cancers. This retrospective study involved outpatients who started adjuvant chemotherapy including tegafur-gimeracil-oteracil potassium or capecitabine during the pre-collaboration period (from January to September 2016) and the post-collaboration period (from August 2018 to April 2019) of 9 months, respectively. Forty-ve and 65 outpatients visited our hospital in the pre-collaboration and post-collaboration periods, respectively. The rate of treatment discontinuation due to side effects within 3 months of the start of treatment was signi cantly lower during the post-collaboration period than the pre-collaboration period (2 patients (3.1％) versus 7 patients (15.6％), P = 0.03). There were no signi cant differences between pre-and post-collaboration periods in the rates of emergency consultation and emergency hospitalization for 3 months after the start of treatment (emergency consultation: 9 patients (20.0％) versus 12 patients (18.5％), P = 1.00; emergency hospitalization: 6 patients (13.3％) versus 4 patients (6.2％), P = 0.31). These results suggest that this collaboration system could contribute to the reduction of treatment discontinuation due to the side effects of adjuvant chemotherapy for gastrointestinal cancers.

Medical Economic Benefit Derived from the Use of Tracing Reports by Pharmacy-Based Pharmacists for Pharmaceutical Intervention and Reduction of Leftover Medicines

“…It also helped to improve the contents of TRs submitted from health insurance pharmacies, and contributed to qualitative improvements in TRs. 15) We found 45 TRs related to cancer chemotherapy (including 30 prompted by patient follow-up) that did not lead to prescription changes and were not judged to have been pharmaceutical interventions. However, further promotion of workshops on cancer chemotherapy for hospital and pharmacy pharmacists is expected to result in additional improvements in the quality of intervention by pharmacy pharmacists in this area.…”

“…This should also make these pharmacists more able to contribute to avoiding adverse drug reactions and enhancing the therapeutic effects of cancer chemotherapy. 15) The only intervention that corresponded to the avoidance of drug interaction was about precaution for coadministration. There were no interventions related to contraindication for coadministration.…”