Electronic Prescription Data to Improve Primary Care Prescribing

NCT ID: NCT02512198

Last Updated: 2021-05-25

Basic Information

• Recruitment Status: COMPLETED
• Clinical Phase: NA
• Total Enrollment: 236 participants
• Study Classification: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Start Date: 2015-07-31
• Study Completion Date: 2017-07-01

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.

Detailed Description

This study makes use of data held in the Prescription Information System (PIS), the national database available to national health service (NHS) health boards in Scotland, on all prescriptions dispensed by community pharmacists which include the unique patient identifier for Scotland (CHI).

The design is a two parallel arm cluster randomised trial with general practices as the unit of randomisation to whom the feedback intervention is directed, and outcomes measured at patient level. Both arms receive the same active interventions but focused on different topics, with each acting as control to the other.

The primary outcome in the asthma arm is a composite of measure of potentially high-risk asthma prescribing (multiple short acting beta-agonists or single agent long acting beta-agonists both in the absence of inhaled corticosteroid therapy).

The primary outcome in the urinary tract infection antibiotic arm is a measure of repeated use of single (likely long-term prevention) or multiple (repeated treatment courses) urinary tract infection antibiotics.

Within the feedback, alongside the patient-level analysis, there will be action-orientated messages to guide the GP practice.

GP practices will get the reports three times at six-monthly intervals.

Conditions

Physician's Practice Patterns

Study Design

• Allocation Method: RANDOMIZED
• Intervention Model: PARALLEL
• Primary Study Purpose: HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH
• Blinding Strategy: NONE

Study Groups

Bronchodilators

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).

Group Type: EXPERIMENTAL

Prescription Data Feedback to GP Practices

Intervention Type: 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

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).

Group Type: EXPERIMENTAL

Prescription Data Feedback to GP Practices

Intervention Type: 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.

Interventions

Prescription Data Feedback to GP Practices

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.

Intervention Type: BEHAVIORAL

Eligibility Criteria

Inclusion Criteria

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

Exclusion Criteria

• 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.

• Eligible Sex: ALL
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: No

Sponsors

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde

OTHER

Sponsor Role: collaborator

University of Dundee

OTHER

Sponsor Role: lead

Responsible Party

Responsibility Role: SPONSOR

Principal Investigators

Sean PD MacBride-Stewart, MSc

Role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR

University of Dundee

Locations

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde

Glasgow, , United Kingdom

Countries

United Kingdom

Other Identifiers

UREC15066

Identifier Type: -

Identifier Source: org_study_id