A consumer-targeted, pharmacist-led, educational intervention to reduce inappropriate medication use in community older adults (D-PRESCRIBE trial): study protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Medication safety for older persons represents an ongoing challenge. Inappropriate prescriptions--those with a high risk of evidence-based harm--persist in up to 25% of seniors, and account for a significant proportion of avoidable emergency department visits. This project is the sequel to the EMPOWER study, in which a novel consumer-targeted written knowledge transfer tool aimed at empowering older adults to act as drivers of benzodiazepine de-prescription resulted in a 27% reduction of inappropriate benzodiazepine use at 6-month follow-up (number needed to treat (NNT) = 4). Failure to discontinue in the EMPOWER study was attributable to re-emerging symptoms among participants, prescribing inertia, and lack of knowledge and skills for substituting alternate therapy among physicians and pharmacists. To maximize de-prescription of inappropriate therapy, educational medication-risk reduction initiatives should be tested that simultaneously include patients, physicians and pharmacists. The objective of this trial is to: 1) test the beneficial effect of a new de-prescribing paradigm enlisting pharmacists to transfer knowledge to both patients and prescribers in a 2-pronged approach to reduce inappropriate prescriptions, compared to usual care and 2) evaluate the transferability of the EMPOWER study concept to other classes of inappropriate prescriptions. METHODS: We intend to conduct a 3-year pragmatic cluster randomized parallel-group controlled trial to test the effect of the new de-prescribing intervention compared to usual care for reducing 4 classes of inappropriate prescriptions from the 2012 Beers criteria among 450 community-dwelling older adults with polypharmacy. Inappropriate prescriptions will include benzodiazepines, sulfonylurea hypoglycemic agents, first generation antihistamines and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. The study population is community-dwelling older adults recruited from community pharmacies in Quebec, Canada. The intervention was developed based on a systematic review of the evidence for each medication. Participants in the experimental group will receive the written educational program following randomization and have their pharmacist send their physicians an evidence-based pharmaceutical opinion to recommend de-prescription and be followed for a year. The control group will be wait-listed for 6 months. DISCUSSION: System change to effectively reduce medication risk among community-dwelling seniors requires a coordinated approach targeting physicians, pharmacists and patients. This trial will test the feasibility and effectiveness of a tripartite approach to de-prescribing. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Registered via ClinicalTrials.gov on 31 January 2014, identifier: NCT02053194.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.055 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".