Preface
ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™ 2025 is a collection of compatibility and stability information on parenteral drug products and is the most recent contribution to this continuing series. With its publication, all previous editions are considered out of date.
One of the core focuses of ASHP as a professional and scientific society has been its long history of publishing internationally recognized, authoritative sources of drug information. Beginning with publication of the Society’s ground-breaking work the American Hospital Formulary Service® (AHFS®; now AHFS Drug Information®) in 1959 and continuing with the definitive works the Parenteral Drug Information Guide™ in 1974, the Handbook on Injectable Drugs® in 1977, and the Medication Teaching Manual® (now AHFS Patient Medication Information™) in 1978, ASHP has consistently set the standard for objective drug information focused on safe and effective drug therapy. For 80 years, ASHP has been at the forefront of efforts to improve medication use and patient safety. Publication of ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™ 2025 is an important component of those efforts. With the 2025 edition of ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™, ASHP marks 53 years of publishing such an invaluable resource on parenteral medications.
First published in 1977 as a key outgrowth of pharmaceutics research and pharmacy practice at the US Public Health Service and National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Handbook on Injectable Drugs® has a long legacy of translating pharmaceutics research into an essential resource for practical patient-care applications. Lawrence A. Trissel, who served as co-author of ASHP’s first resource on injectable drugs—the Parenteral Drug Information Guide™, established this legacy by serving as the distinguished author of the Handbook on Injectable Drugs® for the first 17 editions. ASHP and the profession as a whole remain grateful to Mr. Trissel for his contribution to the pharmaceutics literature and his unyielding dedication to the science of stability and compatibility information on parenteral products.
With the publication of the Mirror to Hospital Pharmacy in 1964, ASHP paved the way for a transition from nursing-driven to pharmacy-led sterile compounding services and has remained an industry leader for both advocacy and best practices related to parenteral medications. The mission of ASHP’s reference publications on compatibility and stability of parenteral products has always been to facilitate the use of the vast body of pharmaceutics research on parenteral medications in a way that could enable those who prescribe, prepare, and administer injectable drugs to more fully apply this information to the benefit of patients. With increasingly complex drug therapy regimens, an abundance of new drug and drug formulation approvals, and ever-present drug shortage issues, pharmaceutics research has important implications for patient care in the inpatient, specialty pharmacy, and home infusion settings. Inappropriate compounding practices involving parenteral medications have resulted in increased sterile compounding regulation and have reinforced the importance of adherence to sterile compounding standards, implementation of best practices in the preparation and administration of parenteral drug products (commercially available or extemporaneously compounded), and application of principles and findings of pharmaceutics research to patient care. For additional information on sterile compounding, ASHP’s Resource Center can be consulted (www.ashp.org/pharmacy-practice/resource-centers/compounding).
Beginning with the 18th edition, the Handbook on Injectable Drugs® became an integral component of ASHP's AHFS® resource collection of authoritative drug information. Applying its expansive drug information and informatics expertise, ASHP’s focus with the subsequent editions has been on the continuing addition and revision of new and existing drug monographs as well as important database enhancements to this indispensable authority on parenteral drugs. ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™ 2025, which was begun to provide a single standardized source of the primary research on the stability, compatibilities, and incompatibilities of injectable drugs, continues to be the most widely recognized “Gold Standard” for such information.
ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™ 2025 includes 25 new monographs, bringing the total in this edition to 418 monographs on parenteral drugs available in the United States and in other countries. In addition, over 75% of the existing monographs have been revised to update information on stability, compatibility, and safety and to provide more specific referencing of manufacturer information and other enhancements to the compatibility tables contained in ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™ 2025. The information cited throughout the text has been compiled from 3990 references, including 276 new to this edition.
ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™ 2025 continues to include information from the Standardize 4 Safety initiative, the first national, interprofessional effort to standardize medication concentrations to reduce errors, especially during transitions of care. This edition of ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™ includes recommended standards for adult and pediatric continuous infusion, PCA, and epidural concentrations. For additional information on the Standardize 4 Safety initiative, please see www.ashp.org/pharmacy-practice/standardize-4-safety-initiative.
For proper use of this reference work, the reader must review “How to Use ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™,” which immediately follows this Preface. This section will acquaint the user of ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™ with its organization, content, structure, summarization strategy, interpretation of the information presented, and limitations of the published literature upon which this reference text is based. Without a good working knowledge of these points, ASHP® Injectable Drug Information™ 2025 may not be used to its best advantage or even interpreted correctly.
ASHP® Injectable Drug InformationTM. Selected Revisions January 10, 2024. © Copyright, 2024. American Society of Health-System Pharmacists®, 4500 East-West Highway, Suite 900, Bethesda, Maryland 20814.
ReferencesFor a list of references cited in the text of this monograph, search the monograph titled References.