An informatics approach to assess pediatric pharmacotherapy: design and implementation of a hospital drug utilization system. 
Drug utilization in the inpatient setting can provide a mechanism to assess drug prescribing trends, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of hospital formularies and examine subpopulations for which prescribing habits may be different.  Such data can be used to correlate trends with time-dependent or seasonal changes in clinical event rates or the introduction of new pharmaceuticals.  It is now possible to provide a robust, dynamic analysis of drug utilization in a large pediatric inpatient setting through the creation of a Web-based hospital drug utilization system that retrieves source data from our accounting database.  The production implementation provides a dynamic and historical account of drug utilization at the authors' institution.  The existing application can easily be extended to accommodate a multi-institution environment.  The creation of a national or even global drug utilization network would facilitate the examination of geographical and/or socioeconomic influences in drug utilization and prescribing practices in general.