[Systematic drug documentation].

Medication histories as the most common way to document individual drug use provide a valuable database. Their main purpose is to check the patient's medication for so-called drug-related problems such as interactions, compliance problems, adverse drug reactions, and others. A second concern is to gain epidemiological evidence which increases the knowledge about benefits and risks of drugs including economic consequences. By referring to well-accepted principles of data protection, the documentation of drug use data has to be an essential part of complex care programmes which allows improvement of the individual drug therapy by reducing possible risks and increasing the therapeutic outcome of drug use more effectively. In addition, systematic drug documentation can be used to build structured databases which usually make use of prescription data. Given that principles of data protection, especially with regard to anonymity, are considered such databases provide an opportunity of data linkage with other health-related information such as health care services or number of sick leave days. Regardless of certain methodological limitations, these databases can also be used for health economics research and evaluation.