LAB-PHARMACY LINKS: LEGAL LABELING LANGUAGE OVERLOAD. G. Schiff 1 , G. Shah 1 , H. Lubin 1 , D. Klass 1 , D. Bates 2 ; 1 Cook County Hospital, Chicago, IL; 2 Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA PURPOSE: Lab and pharmacy are intimately related. However their departments, functions and information systems are often disconnected. The extent of these clinical interrelationships, and expectations upon prescribing physicians to remember critical information (warnings, toxicity, monitoring) is vast and taxes the memory of busy clinicians. A number of drugs have recently been withdrawn because of operational failure in meeting such expectations (eg troglitazone-hepatic toxicity monitoring). To better understand the extent of such information, and because the Physicians Desk Reference (PDR) is the most widely used drug information source and represents legally-mandated prescribing labeling for drugs marketed in the U.S, we analyzed the content of tab-pharmacy interactions and warnings for frequently prescribed and recently approved drugs. METHODS: We developed a taxonomy of critical lab-pharmacy interaction categories, and reviewed all solid oral medications for the most frequently prescribed drugs (N = 40), plus new molecular entities (NME's) marketed in 1998 ± 99(N = 37). We conservatively counted multiple warnings as a single test whenever possible (eg thrombocytopenia, anemia, leukopenia = CBC). RESULTS: