Clinical performance and quality health care
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Clin Perform Qual Health Care · Apr 1997
Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical TrialThe Office of the Future Project: the integration of new technology into office practice. Academic detailing through the super highway. Quebec Research Group on Medication Use in the Elderly.
Effective management of drug therapy in the elderly is a challenge for primary-care physicians. There are 20,400 drugs approved for marketing in Canada. Most elderly patients will fill 33 prescriptions per year and take 5 different medications. ⋯ Information on all prescriptions received by the physicians' elderly patients is downloaded weekly from the provincial prescription claims database, so that the primary physician is able to coordinate and manage all drugs prescribed to their patients by all physicians. The effectiveness of this intervention is being evaluated in a randomized controlled trial of 110 physicians and approximately 16,000 elderly patients in Montreal. We will test whether the intervention reduces the rate of inappropriate prescribing, as well as the rate of drug-related injuries and hospitalizations among patients treated by physicians in the experimental group.