Objective: One of the pharmacist important roles includes evaluating physician’s prescription before dispensing medications. This process not only prevents possible adverse events from using medication, but also improve effectiveness use of medication. Ultimately, pharmacist’s roles are aim to enhance public health care. Pharmacists have been adapting prescription accordingly, however, this processes are not recorded in community pharmacies in South Korea. Method: In this study, we randomly selected 9 pharmacies from Hubase Franchise, collected all adapted prescriptions between 1st of February 2016 and 30th April 2016. After generally rating each modification in eight different categories, the reviewers assessed its outcome more in detail to disprove the importance of the roles of pharmacists in healthcare system. Results: On average, one in 200 prescriptions (0.42%) was found to have been positively modified by nine pharmacies in the study. Total 260 prescriptions were adapted, February 2016 (100 out of 19,764; 0.51%), March (77 out of 21,144; 0.36%), and April (83 out of 20,851; 0.40%). The most frequent changes made for ‘wrong dose’ (117 cases). Adapting days of prescription (42 cases), duplicated therapy (34 cases) and 25 cases for other reasons. In detail, 24 prescription changes made after counseling patients. 9 cases of medication changes made from DUR alarming system. 7 cases to change the form of medication for better compliance, and two cases were made due to contraindication. Conclusion: Pharmacists’ interventions led to modification of prescriptions for an array of drug related problems. Such interventions has positive contribution to the quality of pharmacotherapy. By extrapolating our data, we can estimated huge amount of prescriptions adapted each day in the field. Such processes must be recorded in order to correctly evaluate pharmacist’s role in the system. Reviewers rated the impact of interventions on a patient's health as significant in a substantial number of cases.

Keywords: Pharmacist intervention, Pharmacist role, Prescription adaptation, Prescription error, Cost saving