Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Jul 1, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 1, 2021 - Aug 26, 2021
Date Accepted: Apr 14, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Privacy-preserving audit and feedback on the antibiotic prescribing of General Practitioners
ABSTRACT
Background:
Antibiotic resistance is a worldwide public health problem that is accelerated by misuse and overuse of antibiotics. Studies have shown that audit and feedback enabling clinicians to compare their clinical performance with their peers is effective in reducing inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics. However, privacy concerns make the audit and feedback hard to implement in clinical settings. Therefore, we have developed a privacy-preserving audit and feedback (A&F).
Objective:
The paper aims to evaluate the privacy-preserving audit and feedback (A&F) system in clinical settings.
Methods:
A privacy-preserving A&F system was deployed in three primary care practices in Norway to generate feedback to twenty General Practitioners (GPs) on their prescribing of antibiotics for selected respiratory tract infections. The GPs were asked to participate in a survey shortly after using the system, and we analysed the data.
Results:
Fourteen GPs responded to the questionnaire, representing a 70% (14/20) response rate. The participants were generally satisfied with usefulness of the feedback and the comparison with peers, as well as protection of privacy. The majority of the GPs value the protection of their own privacy, as well as that of their patients.
Conclusions:
The system overcomes important privacy and scaling challenges commonly associated with secondary use of electronic health record (EHR) data, and has a potential to improve antibiotic prescribing behaviour; however, further study is required to assess its actual effect.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.