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When doctor meets a new patient who is administering already prescribed-medicines, it´s important to identify those drugs to avoid the overdose of same drug or drugs which have same pharmacological effects. But most of tablets and capsules available in our country have no identification code on drugs, many medical doctors usually ask phrmacists to identify the drugs which patients have been administering. In present study, the importances of drug identification services in clinical units were reviewed by analyzing the Question ＆ Answer(Q ＆ A) services in the department of pharmacy, Seoul National University Hospital(SNUH), from 1991 to 1995. And questionnaires were conducted on drug identification coding to 209 pharmaceutical companies. From the results of Q ＆ A services, it was noted that about 50％ of questions were focused on drug identifications which were mainly requested from medical doctors. The average time to solve those questions was 14.4 minutes. If all tablets and capsules have identification code, the drug identification will be easily solved, but because most of drugs have no identification code, pharmacist contacted other hospitals and pharmacies where the drugs were prescribed. And according to the questionnaires to pharmaceutical companies, only 73 companies responded among 209 companies (34.9％), and 65 companies suggested the needs of drug identification coding, but most of companies (n=49) raised the difficulties to apply that drug identification coding system to their companies. The main reasons were technological and economic problems.
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