Prevention of potentially inappropriate medication in internal medicine patients: A prospective study using the electronic application PIM-Check

Quality indicators for appropriate in-hospital pharmacotherapeutic stewardship: An international modified Delphi study

AIMS

In-hospital prescribing errors may result in patient harm, such as prolonged hospitalisation and hospital (re)admission, and may be an emotional burden for the prescribers and healthcare professionals involved. Despite efforts, in-hospital prescribing errors and related harm still occur, necessitating an innovative approach. We therefore propose a novel approach, in-hospital pharmacotherapeutic stewardship (IPS). The aim of this study was to reach consensus on a set of quality indicators (QIs) as a basis for IPS.

METHODS

A three-round modified Delphi procedure was performed. Potential QIs were retrieved from two systematic searches of the literature, in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) statement. In two written questionnaires and a focus meeting (held between the written questionnaire rounds), potential QIs were appraised by an international, multidisciplinary expert panel composed of members of the European Association for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (EACPT).

RESULTS

The expert panel rated 59 QIs and four general statements, of which 35 QIs were accepted with consensus rates ranging between 79% and 97%. These QIs describe the activities of an IPS programme, the team delivering IPS, the patients eligible for the programme and the outcome measures that should be used to evaluate the care delivered.

CONCLUSIONS

A framework of 35 QIs for an IPS programme was systematically developed. These QIs can guide hospitals in setting up a pharmacotherapeutic stewardship programme to reduce in-hospital prescribing errors and improve in-hospital medication safety.

Using a mobile application to reduce potentially inappropriate prescribing for older Brazilian adults in primary care: a triple-blind randomised clinical trial

BACKGOUND

Potentially inappropriate prescribing (PIP) has been evaluated in several countries, and several strategies have been devised for deprescribing drugs in older adults. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a mobile application in reducing PIP for older adults in primary care facilities in Brazil.

METHODS

This randomised, triple-blind, parallel-group trial was conducted in 22 public primary care facilities in Brazil. During the intervention phase, the general practitioners (GPs) were randomly allocated to the intervention (MPI Brasil app provides information about PIP, therapeutic alternatives and deprescribing) or control (MedSUS app provides general information about medications) group. All GPs were trained on the Clinical Decision-Making Process and how to access an Evidence-Based Health website. The GPs received an Android tablet with an installed mobile application depending on their allocated group, which they used when caring for older patients over at least 3 months. At the end of this period, a sample of older patients aged ≥ 60 years who had been awaiting medical consultation by the participating GPs were interviewed and their prescriptions analysed. The primary outcome was the frequency of PIP in and between the groups.

RESULTS

Among 53 GPs who were administered the baseline survey, 14 were included in the clinical trial. At baseline, 146 prescriptions were analysed: the PIP overall was 37.7% (55/146), in the intervention group was 40.6% (28/69), and in the control group was 35.1% (27/77). After the intervention, 284 prescriptions were analysed: the PIP overall was 31.7% (90/284), in the intervention group was 32.2% (46/143), and in the control group was 31.2% (44/141) (RR: 1.16; 95% CI, 0.76-1.76). In the within-group analysis, the PIP reduced from before to after the intervention in both groups-more significantly in the intervention than in the control group (p < 0.001). In the stratified analysis of PIP frequency by GPs, there was a relative risk reduction in 86% (6/7) of GPs in the intervention group compared to 71% (5/7) in the control group.

CONCLUSION

We found that the MPI Brasil app effectively reduced PIP, suggesting that it may be useful to incorporate this tool into clinical practice.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

The study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02918643). First registration on 22/09/2016.

Potentially inappropriate prescribing in hospitalised children: a retrospective, cross-sectional study at a tertiary children's hospital in China

INTRODUCTION

For improving and optimising drug use in children, we previously developed a tool (including a series of criteria for identifying potentially inappropriate prescribing in children) by literature review and the two-round Delphi technique to prevent inappropriate medication prescriptions at the prescribing stage.

OBJECTIVE

To assess the prevalence of potentially inappropriate prescription (PIP) among hospitalised children and explore risk factors associated with PIP.

DESIGN

A retrospective cross-sectional study.

SETTING

A tertiary children's hospital in China.

PARTICIPANTS

Hospitalised children with complete medical records who received drug treatment and discharged from 1 January to 31 December 2021.

OUTCOME MEASURES

We evaluated the medication prescriptions by using a series of previously developed criteria for detecting the prevalence of PIP in hospitalised children and used logistic regression to explore the risk factors (including sex, age, number of drugs, number of comorbidities, days of hospitalisation and admission departments) for PIP in children.

RESULTS

A total of 87 555 medication prescriptions for 16 995 hospitalised children were analysed, and 19 722 PIPs were detected. The prevalence of PIP was 22.53%, and 36.92% of the children had at least one PIP during hospitalisation. The department with the highest prevalence of PIP was the surgical department (OR 9.413; 95% CI 5.521 to 16.046), followed by the paediatric intensive care unit (PICU; OR 8.206; 95% CI 6.643 to 10.137). 'Inhaled corticosteroids for children with respiratory infections but without chronic respiratory diseases' was the most frequent PIP. Logistic regression results showed that PIP was more likely to occur in male patients (OR 1.128, 95% CI 1.059 to 1.202) and younger patients (<2 years old; OR 1.974; 95% CI 1.739 to 2.241), and in those with more comorbidities (≥11 types; OR 4.181; 95% CI 3.671 to 4.761), concomitant drugs (≥11 types; OR 22.250; 95% CI 14.468 to 34.223) or longer hospital stay (≥30 days; OR 8.130; 95% CI 6.727 to 9.827).

CONCLUSIONS

Medications for long-term hospitalised young children with multiple comorbidities should be minimised and optimised, to avoid PIP, reduce adverse drug reactions and ensure children's medication safety. The surgery department and PICU had a high prevalence of PIP in the studied hospital and should be the focus of supervision and management in routine prescription review.

Development and retrospective evaluation of a clinical decision support system for the efficient detection of drug-related problems by clinical pharmacists

BACKGROUND

Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) can help identify drug-related problems (DRPs). However, the alert specificity remains variable. Defining more relevant alerts for detecting DRPs would improve CDSS.

AIM

Develop electronic queries that assist pharmacists in conducting medication reviews and an assessment of the performance of this model to detect DRPs.

METHOD

Electronic queries were set up in CDSS using "triggers" from electronic health records: drug prescriptions, laboratory values, medical problems, vital signs, demographics. They were based on a previous study where 315 patients admitted in internal medicine benefited from a multidisciplinary medication review (gold-standard) to highlight potential DRPs. Electronic queries were retrospectively tested to assess performance in detecting DRPs revealed with gold-standard. For each electronic query, sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value were computed.

RESULTS

Of 909 DRPs, 700 (77.8%) were used to create 366 electronic queries. Electronic queries correctly detected 77.1% of DRPs, median sensitivity and specificity reached 100.0% (IQRs, 100.0%-100.0%) and 99.7% (IQRs, 97.0%-100.0%); median positive predictive value and negative predictive value reached 50.0% (IQRs, 12.5%-100.0%) and 100.0% (IQRs, 100.0%-100.0%). Performances varied according to "triggers" (p < 0.001, best performance in terms of predictive positive value when exclusively involving drug prescriptions).

CONCLUSION

Electronic queries based on electronic heath records had high sensitivity and negative predictive value and acceptable specificity and positive predictive value and may contribute to facilitate medication review. Implementing some of these electronic queries (the most effective and clinically relevant) in current practice will allow a better assessment of their impact on the efficiency of the clinical pharmacist.

A tool for screening potentially inappropriate prescribing in Chinese children

Background: More than half of adverse drug events in pediatric patients are avoidable and blocking medication errors at the prescribing stage might be one of the most effective preventive measures.

Objective: To form a tool (a series of criteria) for detecting potentially inappropriate prescriptions in children, promote clinical rational drug use and reduce risks of medication in children.

Methods: Potentially inappropriate prescription propositions for children were collected through a systematic review. Then, the Delphi technique was adopted to form the final criteria. Panelists were asked to use a 5-point Likert scale to rate their agreement with each potentially inappropriate prescription proposition and were encouraged to add new propositions based on their clinical experience and knowledge. After 2 rounds of Delphi survey and propositions were fully revised and improved, the final criteria for identifying potentially inappropriate prescriptions in children were formed.

Results: The final criteria for identifying potential inappropriate prescriptions in children has 136 propositions, which were divided into “criteria for children with non-specific diseases/conditions” (71 propositions: 68 for potentially inappropriate medication, 3 for potential prescribing omission) and “criteria for children with specific diseases/conditions” (65 propositions: 55 for potentially inappropriate medication, 10 for potential prescribing omission), according to whether the proposition was about identifying specific risks associated with one drug in children with a specific other diseases/conditions that do not exist in children with other diseases/conditions.

Conclusion: A tool for screening potentially inappropriate prescriptions in children is formed to detect potentially inappropriate medication and prescribing omission in pediatrics and is available to all medical professionals liable to prescribe or dispense medicines to children.

Decision-support systems for managing polypharmacy in the elderly: A scoping review

Polypharmacy, the consuming of more than five drugs, is a public health problem. It can lead to many interactions and adverse drug reactions and is very expensive. Therapeutic guidelines for managing polypharmacy in the elderly have been issued, but are highly complex, limiting their use. Decision-support systems have therefore been developed to automate the execution of these guidelines, or to provide information about drugs adapted to the context of polypharmacy. These systems differ widely in terms of their technical design, knowledge sources and evaluation methods. We present here a scoping review of electronic systems for supporting the management, by healthcare providers, of polypharmacy in elderly patients. Most existing reviews have focused mainly on evaluation results, whereas the present review also describes the technical design of these systems and the methodologies for developing and evaluating them. A systematic bibliographic search identified 19 systems differing considerably in terms of their technical design (rule-based systems, documentary approach, mixed); outputs (textual report, alerts and/or visual approaches); and evaluations (impact on clinical practices, impact on patient outcomes, efficiency and/or user satisfaction). The evaluations performed are minimal (among all the systems identified, only one system has been evaluated according to all the criteria mentioned above) and no machine learning systems and/or conflict management systems were retrieved. This review highlights the need to develop new methodologies, combining various approaches for decision support system in polypharmacy.

Impact of Pharmaceutical Interventions in Hospitalized Patients: A Comparative Study Between Clinical Pharmacists and an Explicit Criteria-Based Tool

Background

It has been well recognized that pharmaceutical interventions (PIs) can prevent patient harm related to prescribing errors. Various tools have been developed to facilitate the detection and the reduction of inappropriate prescriptions and some have shown benefit on clinical outcomes.

Objective

The objective of this study was to evaluate the clinical, economical, and organizational impact of interventions generated by clinical pharmacists in hospitalized patients, and to evaluate the performance of an explicit tool, the Potentially Inappropriate Medication Checklist for Patients in Internal Medicine (PIM-Check), in detecting each pharmacist's intervention.

Methods

A cohort retrospective study was conducted on hospitalized patients. The impact of PIs based on pharmacists’ standard examination was evaluated using the Clinical, Economic, and Organizational (CLEO) tool. The performance of PIM-Check in detecting each intervention was assessed by conducting a retrospective medication review based on available information collected from patients’ records. A qualitative analysis was also conducted to identify the types of PIs that PIM-Check failed to detect.

Results

The study was performed on 162 patients with a median age of 68 years (interquartile range = 46–77 years) and a median hospital stay of 5 days (interquartile range = 4–7 days). The pharmacists generated 1.9 PIs per patient (n = 304) of which 31% were detected by PIM-Check. The acceptance rate of the interventions by physicians was 84% (n = 255). Among the accepted interventions, 53% (n = 136) had a clinical impact graded CL ≥ 2C (moderate or major), whereas the majority of them were not detected by PIM-Check (63%; 86 out of 136). In addition, 46% of accepted interventions (n = 117) were associated with a cost decrease, among which 62% were not detected by PIM-Check (73 out of 117). The qualitative analysis shows that PIM-Check mostly failed to detect PIs related to dose adjustment, overprescribing, and therapy monitoring.

Conclusions

According to the CLEO tool evaluation of PIs, our results show that clinical pharmacists’ interventions are associated with improved clinical outcomes. In comparison with pharmacists’ interventions, PIM-Check failed in detecting the majority of interventions associated with a moderate or major impact.

Prescription of Potentially Inappropriate Medication in Older Inpatients of an Internal Medicine Ward: Concordance and Overlap Among the EU(7)-PIM List and Beers and STOPP Criteria

Background: Age-related comorbidities prone older adults to polypharmacy and to an increased risk of potentially inappropriate medication (PIM) use. This work aims to analyze the concordance and overlap among the EU(7)-PIM list, 2019 Beers criteria, and Screening Tool of Older Person’s Prescriptions (STOPP) version 2 criteria and also to analyze the prevalence of PIM.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted on older inpatients of an internal medicine ward. Demographic, clinical, and pharmacological data were collected, during March 2020. After PIM identification by the EU(7)-PIM list, Beers criteria, and STOPP v2 criteria, the concordance and overlap between criteria were analyzed. A descriptive analysis was performed, and all the results with a p-value lower than 0.05 were considered statistically significant.

Results: A total of 616 older patients were included in the study whose median age was 85 (Q1–Q3) (78–89) years. Most of the older patients were male (51.6%), and the median (Q1–Q3) number of days of hospitalization was 17 (13–22) days. According to the EU(7)-PIM list, Beers criteria, and STOPP criteria, 79.7, 92.0, and 76.5% of older adults, respectively, used at least one PIM. A poor concordance (<63.4%) among criteria was observed. An association between PIM and the number of prescribed medicines was found in all applied criteria. Moreover, an association between the number of PIMs and diagnoses of endocrine, nutritional, and metabolic diseases, mental, behavioral, and neurodevelopmental disorders, and circulatory system diseases and days of hospitalization was observed according to Beers criteria, and that with diseases of the circulatory system and musculoskeletal system and connective tissue was observed according to STOPP criteria.

Conclusion: Despite the poor concordance between the EU(7)-PIM list, 2019 Beers, and STOPP v2 criteria, this work highlights the need for more studies in inpatients to develop strategies to facilitate the identification of PIM to decrease the high prevalence of PIM in hospitalized patients. The poor concordance among criteria also highlights the need to develop new tools adapting the existing criteria to medical ward inpatients.

Ability to detect potentially inappropriate prescribing in older patients: comparative analysis between PIM-Check and STOPP/STARTv2

Purpose

Potentially inappropriate prescribing (PIP) is a source of preventable adverse drug events. The objective of this study was a comparative analysis (quantitative and qualitative) between two tools used to detect PIP, PIM-Check and STOPP/START.

Methods

First, a qualitative analysis (QAC) was conducted to evaluate the concordance between the criteria, which constitute PIM-Check and the gold standard STOPP/START. Second, a retrospective comparative and observational study was performed on the list of treatment at the admission of 50 older patients hospitalized in an acute geriatric ward of a university hospital in Switzerland in 2016 using both tools.

Results

The QAC has shown that 50% (57 criteria) of STOPP/START criteria are fully or partially concordant with those of PIM-Check. The retrospective study was performed on 50 patients aged 87 years, suffering from 5 co-morbidities (min–max 1–11) and treated by of 8 drugs (min–max 2–16), as medians. The prevalence of the detected PIP was 80% by PIM-Check and 90% by STOPP/START. Medication review shows that 4.2 PIP per patient were detected by PIM-Check and 3.5 PIP by STOPP/START among which 1.9 PIP was commonly detected by both tools, as means. PIM-Check detected more PIP related to cardiology, angiology, nephrology, and endocrinology in older patients but missed the PIP related to geriatric syndromes (e.g., fall, dementia, Alzheimer) detected by STOPP/START.

Conclusions

By using PIM-Check in geriatric settings, some PIP will not be detected. It is considered as a limitation for this tool in this frail population but brings a certain complementarity in other areas of therapy not covered by STOPP/START.