Step 1: Filling in a Complete, Proper Patient Profile

A very important step that most of pharmacists miss especially those working in a community pharmacy is "Patient Profiling". Pharmacist should treat their patients as patients not just a consumer coming into their pharmacy to purchase a product. In any setting, there must be an electronic database for all patients demanding service from a pharmacy. If electronic version is hard to accomplish, A well organized paper-based database will do the job. So let's discuss in detail what is a patient profile. 

A patient profile is:

A readily retrievable, centrally located information record that contains patient demographics, allergies, and medication profile. There are a lot of templates and forms for patient profile that might differ from one place to another. 

Important components of any patient profile includes:

1. Demographic Data: This includes age, sex, weight, height, pregnancy/breastfeeding (female), Residency, occupation, marital status, Social and family history. (some forms might contain more information as social number, phone number, etc)
2. Current illness: This field includes what the patient is suffering from right now, which led to admission to a hospital or visiting a physician or even requiring therapy.
3. Medical History: This includes all condition that the patients suffers from. The importance of this field is to understand the need for prescribed medications (medication history), to interpret the effect of newly prescribed medications on patient condition and to detect any possible drug-disease interaction that might have or will happen. This field might also include any operations the patient has undergone.
4. Medication History: This field includes the medications that the patient is already taking due to other conditions. It is very important to document both POM and OTC medication plus other supplements/herbal products the patient is taking. This field is very important to understand drug-drug interactions and to detect effect of drugs on the patient current/previous condition. 
5. Allergy: This is a very important field. sometimes it's incorporated with medical history but it's preferred to be separate field. Here we document all patient allergies whether food, medications, insects, etc. This of course is important to avoid deleterious effects when prescribing medications that the patient is allergic to. Of the most common examples: Penicillins, allopurinol. 
6. Medications: This field includes the newly prescribed medications. All information about the medication should be documented including date, dose, frequency, duration of use. Sometimes, in case of hospitals, the medication field is in the form of a table and a checklist to check each day that the patient is taking their medications. Of course in a community pharmacy this can't be achieved. 

Patient profiling is a very important step to optimize drug therapy to patients. Having all information regarding each patient in one or 2 pages or on a computer database will make it feasible to detect any problems or errors, also make the pharmacist aware of side effects, major interactions or any adverse events that occurred or might occur from therapy. Thus, new software and databases are being developed to ensure a flawless system is available to pharmacists to make it easier to document patient information.

References:

1. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.1982.9938924

2. https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc2378816

3. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F106002807000400306