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

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

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, G.C., GRANT, A., HUGHES, C. and DREISCHULTE, T. 2025. Interventional pharmacoepidemiology: design and evaluation of interventions to improve prescribing. American journal of epidemiology [online], 194(4), pages 1052-1057. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwae109

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 6, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Jun 12, 2024
• Publication Date: Apr 1, 2025
• 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
• Volume: 194
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 1052-1057
• 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.