Electronic Prescription Data to Improve Primary Care Prescribing

NCT02512198 | Completed

• 1 other identifier: UREC15066
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 236
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 1

Brief Summary

This is a randomised controlled study to evaluate the effect of providing prescribing feedback that includes individual patient data to General Practitioners (GP) in Scotland on high risk or low quality prescribing.

Conditions

Physician's Practice Patterns

Keywords

Professional Practice; General Practitioners; Inappropriate Prescribing; Persuasive Communication; Information Theory; Feedback

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (1)

• Number of people identified by the measures of high risk or low quality prescribing

  12 months

Secondary Outcomes (1)

• Cost-effectiveness of feedback

  12 months

Study Arms (2)

Bronchodilators

EXPERIMENTAL

Prescription Data Feedback to GP Practices - practices will be fed back data for people with presumed asthma who have either been dispensed more than 12 short-acting beta-agonist bronchodilators in the last 12 months who are not concurrently prescribed inhaled corticosteroids (poor asthma control with inadequate prevention) or been dispensed a long-acting beta-agonist bronchodilator as a single agent in the last 12 months who are not or are only infrequently concurrently prescribed inhaled corticosteroids (potentially harmful prescribing). To minimise inclusion of people with COPD, patient aged 35 years and older prescribed long-acting antimuscarinic bronchodilators will be excluded. Practices in the bronchodilator arm are controls for the antibiotic experimental arm (below).

Behavioral: Prescription Data Feedback to GP Practices

Antibiotics

EXPERIMENTAL

Prescription Data Feedback to GP Practices - number of women in the GP practice aged 12 years and older dispensed more than 6 courses of urinary tract infection (UTI) antibiotics in the last year. UTI antibiotics are defined as trimethoprim, nitrofurantoin, co-trimoxazole, quinolones and cefalexin. Practices in the antibiotic arm are controls for the bronchodilator experimental arm (above).

Behavioral: Prescription Data Feedback to GP Practices

Interventions

Prescription Data Feedback to GP Practices BEHAVIORAL

GP practices will be randomly assigned to receive reports on one of the two topics. They will get these three times at six-monthly intervals. Within the feedback, alongside the patient-level analysis, there will be action-orientated messages to guide the GP practice.

Antibiotics; Bronchodilators

Eligibility Criteria

• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: No
• Age Groups: Child (0-17), Adult (18-64), Older Adult (65+)

You may qualify if:

• GP practices in the participating Health Board area (NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde)

You may not qualify if:

• GP practices with registered list sizes \<250 patients (all of these are unusual practices in various ways, for example serving the homeless or people with challenging behaviour).
• GP practices with \<80% of prescriptions for inhaled bronchodilators and UTI antibiotics in the prescription database with a recorded patient identifier for each month from January 2014 to December 2014.
• GP practices which were created after 1 January 2015.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Dundee: lead
• NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde: collaborator

Study Sites (1)

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde

Glasgow, G12 0XH, United Kingdom

Location

Study Officials

• Sean PD MacBride-Stewart, MSc

  University of Dundee

  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: not applicable
• Allocation: RANDOMIZED
• Masking: NONE
• Purpose: HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH
• Intervention Model: PARALLEL
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: SPONSOR

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: July 23, 2015
• First Posted: July 30, 2015
• Study Start: July 1, 2015
• Primary Completion: January 1, 2017
• Study Completion: July 1, 2017
• Last Updated: May 25, 2021

Record last verified: 2021-05

Locations

GB (1)