Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Feb 28, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 1, 2024 - Apr 26, 2024
Date Accepted: Mar 23, 2024
(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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Use of patient partnership tools to support medication safety in community dwelling older adults: protocol for a non-randomized stepped wedge cluster study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Preventable patient harms from medications are significant threats to patient safety in ambulatory and community settings, especially among community-dwelling older adults on multiple prescription medications. Patients may partner with primary care professionals by taking on active roles in decisions, learning basics of medication self-management, and working with community resources.
Objective:
We aim to assess the impact of a set of patient partnership tools to further encourage and empower older patients to make better/ more effective use of their office visits to improve medication safety.
Methods:
The study is a non-randomized stepped wedge cluster trial with a parallel arm at a private and two safety-net primary care clinics, with 1 cluster per sequence in 2 sequences and 1 control sequence. Cross-sectional surveys will be taken immediately at the conclusion of visits to the clinics during 6 time periods of 6 weeks each, with a transition period of no data collection before intervention. The numbers of visits to be surveyed will vary by period and cluster. We plan to recruit patients and professionals for surveys during 405 visits. In the experimental periods, visits will be conducted with two partnership tools and associated clinic process changes: 1) a one-page ‘visit preparation guide’ given to relevant patients by clinic staff before seeing the provider, with the intention to improve communication and shared decision-making; and (2) a library of short educational videos that clinic staff encourage patients to watch on medication safety. In the control periods, visits will be conducted with usual care.
Results:
The primary outcome will be patients’ medication use self-efficacy. The secondary outcomes are medication related issues such as duplicate therapies identified by primary care providers and assessment of collaborative work during visit.
Conclusions:
This study will assess the impact of patient partnership tools and associated process changes in primary care on medication use self-efficacy and medication related issues identified. The study is powered to identify types of patients who may benefit most from primary care office visit based patient engagement tools. Clinical Trial: This study was registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT05880368) on May 26, 2023
Citation
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Copyright
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