BackgroundTo improve medication surveillance and provide pharmacotherapeutic support in University Hospitals Leuven, a back-office clinical service, called “Check of Medication Appropriateness” (CMA), was developed, consisting of clinical rule based screening for medication inappropriateness. The aim of this study is twofold: 1) describing the development of CMA and 2) evaluating the preliminary results, more specifically the number of clinical rule alerts, number of actions on the alerts and acceptance rate by physicians.MethodsCMA focuses on patients at risk for potentially inappropriate medication and involves the daily checking by a pharmacist of high-risk prescriptions generated by advanced clinical rules integrating patient specific characteristics with details on medication. Pharmacists’ actions are performed by adding an electronic note in the patients’ medical record or by contacting the physician by phone. A retrospective observational study was performed to evaluate the primary outcomes during an 18-month study period.Results39,481 clinical rule alerts were checked by pharmacists for which 2568 (7%) electronic notes were sent and 637 (1.6%) phone calls were performed. 37,782 (96%) alerts were checked within four pharmacotherapeutic categories: drug use in renal insufficiency (25%), QTc interval prolonging drugs (11%), drugs with a restricted indication or dosing (14%) and overruled very severe drug-drug interactions (50%). The emergency department was a frequently involved ward and anticoagulants are the drug class for which actions are most frequently carried out. From the 458 actions performed for the four abovementioned categories, 69% were accepted by physicians.ConclusionsThese results demonstrate the added value of CMA to support medication surveillance in synergy with already integrated basic clinical decision support and bedside clinical pharmacy. Otherwise, the study also highlighted a number of limitations, allowing improvement of the service.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12911-019-0748-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Background and purpose Enterovirus infections pose a serious threat for patients with humoral deficiencies and may be lethal, whilst the efficacy of proposed treatment options such as corticosteroids, intravenous immunoglobulins and fluoxetine remains debated. Methods Viral clearance was investigated in a patient with rituximab‐induced B‐cell depletion and chronic echovirus 13 (E13) meningoencephalitis/myofasciitis in response to intravenous immunoglobulins and fluoxetine using sequential semi‐quantitative E13 viral load measurements by real‐time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. Fluoxetine concentrations in plasma and cerebrospinal fluid were determined by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry. Results Intravenous immunoglobulins appeared ineffective in this case of E13 infection, whereas virus clearance in cerebrospinal fluid was obtained after 167 days of oral fluoxetine. Since treatment with corticosteroids resulted in a flare of symptoms, rechallenge with viral load measurements was not attempted. Conclusion In this report of a patient with rituximab‐associated chronic echovirus 13 meningoencephalitis, viral clearance in response to single treatment options is assessed for the first time. Our observations further support the in vivo efficacy of fluoxetine against enteroviral infections. More research is needed to establish its efficacy in different enterovirus strains.

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