Evaluating prescribing safety indicators in clinical decision support
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Evaluating prescribing safety indicators embedded in computerised clinical decision support software OptimiseRx
IRAS ID
256876
Contact name
Niels Peek
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 11 months, 29 days
Research summary
Patients can sometimes be harmed by their medication because of inappropriate prescribing. To help doctors and other practitioners to prescribe more safely, computer programs are implemented in many general practices to aid clinical decision making. During the prescription process, these programs automatically check the patient’s electronic health record for potential factors that could influence safety of the medication being prescribed. These include, for example, use of other medications and other diagnoses. An alert is sent to the prescriber if the prescription is identified to be potentially hazardous to the patient. We aim to understand whether the implementation of one of these computerised clinical decision support systems, OptimiseRx, has led to a reduction in the number of potentially harmful prescriptions. In cases when these prescriptions were made, we also want to measure how often they resulted in serious harm to the patients. For example, whether the patients have had to go to hospital, reasons for hospital admission, or whether the patients have died. We will do this by analysing patient information from the ResearchOne dataset, which is a database of electronic health records in general practices. These records will be linked with data on hospital admissions and death registrations. We will compare the rates of potentially harmful prescriptions made before and after the implementation of OptimiseRx. We will also compare general practices that use the OptimiseRx system with practices that do not use it, to see if there is any difference in how often these potentially harmful prescribing events happen. We will calculate the cost of these events to the NHS. This research is being funded by the National Institute of Health and Research as part of a larger project on medication safety.
REC name
North West - Greater Manchester West Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
19/NW/0606
Date of REC Opinion
10 Oct 2019
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion