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Interventional pharmacoepidemiology: design and evaluation of interventions to improve prescribing.

Alexander, G. Caleb; Grant, Aileen; Hughes, Carmel; Dreischulte, Tobias

Authors

G. Caleb Alexander

Carmel Hughes

Tobias Dreischulte



Abstract

Despite the value of modern therapeutics, many obstacles prevent their optimal use. Overuse, underuse and misuse are common, resulting in morbidity and mortality impacting billions of individuals across the world. Pharmacoepidemiology provides important insights into drug utilization, safety and effectiveness in large populations, and it is an important method to identify opportunities to improve the value of therapeutics in clinical practice. However, for these opportunities to be realized, interventions to improve prescribing must be developed, evaluated and implemented in the real world. We provide an overview of this process, focusing especially on how such interventions can be designed and deployed to maximize scalability, adoption and impact. Prescribing represents a complex behavior with barriers and enablers, and interventions to improve prescribing will be most successful when developed, piloted and refined to maximize provider and patient acceptability. Carefully developed evaluations of interventions are also critical, and varied methods are available to empirically evaluate the intended and potential unintended consequences of interventions. With illustrative examples from the peer-reviewed literature, we provide readers with an overview of approaches to the essential and growing field of interventional pharmacoepidemiology.

Citation

ALEXANDER, C., GRANT, A., HUGHES, C. and DREISCHULTE, T. [2024]. Interventional pharmacoepidemiology: design and evaluation of interventions to improve prescribing. American journal of epidemiology [online], Advance Articles. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwae109

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 6, 2024
Online Publication Date Jun 12, 2024
Deposit Date Jan 12, 2024
Publicly Available Date Jun 13, 2025
Journal American journal of epidemiology
Print ISSN 0002-9262
Electronic ISSN 1476-6256
Publisher Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwae109
Keywords Interventions; Prescription drugs; Prescribing quality; Prescribing indicators
Public URL https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/2153185
Additional Information This article has been published with separate supporting information. This supporting information has been incorporated into a single file on this repository and can be found at the end of the file associated with this output.