Impact of a therapeutic drug monitoring program for digoxin
- 1 August 1987
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Medical Association (AMA) in Archives of internal medicine (1960)
- Vol. 147 (8) , 1405-1408
- https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.147.8.1405
Abstract
Although numerous utilization reviews of serum digoxin assays have demonstrated the positive impact of therapeutic drug monitoring, to our knowledge, the question of whether the withdrawal of such a program would reverse the effect has not been addressed. The current study employed a prospective, randomized, crossover design to evaluate this question and document the cost savings. There were 196 serum digoxin assays performed in the 207 patients. It was found that a continuous therapeutic drug-monitoring program was warranted since, after its withdrawal, there was a deterioration in audit criteria performance. Reimplementation of the therapeutic drug-monitoring program resulted in a significant decrease in the average number of assays requested per patient (from 1.41 to 0.73) and an improvement in audit criteria performance.This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:
- Use of Laboratory Tests in a Teaching Hospital: Long-Term TrendsAnnals of Internal Medicine, 1979
- Clinical Pharmacokinetics of DigoxinClinical Pharmacokinetics, 1977