NCT01602705

Effective Feedback to Improve Primary Care Prescribing Safety

Effective Feedback to Improve Primary Care Prescribing Safety (EFIPPS): a Randomised Controlled Trial Using ePrescribing Data

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 262 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Dundee · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: —
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

We hypothesise that feedback and feedback + psychology informed intervention delivered to primary care medical practices will reduce high-risk prescribing to patients compared to a simple educational intervention alone. The specific objectives are : 1. To test the effectiveness of the two EFIPPS feedback arms in reducing the specified primary outcome of a composite measure of high-risk antipsychotic, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, and antiplatelet drug prescribing 2. To test the effectiveness of the two EFIPPS feedback arms in reducing the specified secondary outcomes of the six individual measures constituting the composite 3. To assess the cost-effectiveness of the intervention

Detailed description

High risk prescribing is the use of drugs which carry significant risk to patients. Such prescribing is not always inappropriate but does require regular review to ensure that the balance of risk and benefit in individuals is appropriate. High risk prescribing is common and varies widely between practices, and there is evidence that intensive interventions (for example, pharmacist led medication review) can reduce rates of high risk prescribing. The aim of this study is to test whether a simpler and therefore cheaper feedback intervention can reduce high risk prescribing. The study is a three arm cluster randomised trial with primary care medical practices as the unit of randomisation and outcomes measured at patient level using routinely held prescribing for individual patients. The trial will compare two forms of feedback of practice rates of high risk prescribing with usual care. Usual care matches existing NHS working practice. The first active arm will receive quarterly feedback. The second active arm will receive the same feedback plus a health psychology informed intervention designed to promote response to feedback embedded in the feedback.

Conditions

• Complications of Surgical and Medical Care: General Terms

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Usual care	Practices in the usual care arm receive a one-off educational newsletter and support for searching for patients in their electronic health record in the form of downloadable searches
OTHER	Feedback of Performance	Usual care (educational newsletter and support for searching) plus quarterly feedback of practice rates of high risk prescribing compared to a benchmark of the upper quartile of all practices in the year before
OTHER	Feedback of Performance + Health Psychology Informed Intervention	Usual care (educational newsletter + support for searching) plus quarterly feedback plus health psychology informed intervention (persuasive communication and action planning) embedded in feedback

Timeline

• Start date: 2012-06-01
• Primary completion: 2013-10-01
• Completion: 2013-10-01
• First posted: 2012-05-21
• Last updated: 2014-10-07

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United Kingdom