Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) enables the optimization of individual dosing of drugs with a narrow therapeutic window and with a high inter- and intraindividual variability of pharmacokinetic parameters. The existence of a good connection between the concentration of the drug in the blood and its pharmacological effect is essential. In maintaining the therapeutic concentrations of drugs, pharmacokinetic software can be highly useful, helping the healthcare personnel to determine the optimum regimen for the dosing of drugs.
In the Central Pharmacy of the University Medical Centre Maribor, by means of a retrospective research, we evaluated the clinical applicability of seven pharmacokinetic software (Kinetidex®, DoseMe®, ClinCalc.com Vancomycin Calculator®, GlobalRPh®, PrecisePK®, MwPharm++® in JPKD®) intended for TDM. We compared the general properties of the software and evaluated the predicted maintenance daily doses and the serum concentration of the drugs at the time of the next measurement, using anonymised data of 50 patients from different age groups (premature infants, children, younger adults, older adults) who had already completed the treatment with gentamicin or vancomycin and had undergone TDM during their treatment.
The comparison of the properties of the pharmacokinetic software has shown that more demanding software are better, since they can be used simultaneously by several users, they include models for multiple drugs and for different patient populations, enable graphical displays and printouts of the reports, but are more expensive. MwPharm++® has the most options for settings, entering the data and comparing the results, but working with it its highly complex. DoseMe® and Kinetidex® have proved to be the best for routine work, which, according to our assessment, also create the best reports. By comparing the daily dose predictions, we determined that PrecisePK® and JPKD® on average deviated the most from the other software, which predicted in a similar range of deviations. Overall, the most successful in matching the predictions of the concentrations with the measured serum concentrations of the drugs was DoseMe®. On average, the software showed the best predictions of serum concentrations in the population of young adult patients and the worst in the population of children.
A comparison of the features and verification of the accuracy of the predictions made by the seven selected pharmacokinetic software has shown that none of them meets all the requirements for an ideal tool. However, we can conclude that, in almost all the categories of evaluation, the newest of the software used – DoseMe® has proven to be the best.
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