[Surveillance of adverse drug events in hospitals: implementation and performance of triggers].

Adverse drug events (ADE) are important causes of impairment of the quality of care for inpatients and therefore should be identified and characterized. Thus, lists of triggers were developed, including the proposal by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. We analyzed the application of these triggers in a university hospital, with the cooperation of pharmacy and medical students, field training, standardized forms and manuals. Here, we present the process of application and performance of these triggers in a teaching hospital. The information on the triggers and ADE were collected through a retrospective chart review of patients discharged from January to June 2008. Four hundred and ninety-seven triggers were identified in 177 charts, and each chart had 2.33 (SD = 2.7) triggers on average. The most frequent triggers were: "antiemetic" (72.1/100 charts), "abrupt cessation of medication" (70.0/100 charts) and "over-sedation, drowsiness, numbness, lethargy, hypotension and fall" (34.6/100 charts). The most effective triggers for capturing ADE were "benzodiazepine antagonist", "antidiarrheal" and "rash", which, when identified in charts, were related to an event. The ADE most commonly found were related to the triggers, "abrupt cessation of medication" (8.3/100 charts), "antiemetic" (4.6/100 charts), "rash" and "anti-allergy" (2.1/100 charts). These results may help to decide which triggers are more useful in each situation.