Nick Connor
The potential to quantify polypharmacy in older adult hospital inpatients using electronic prescribing software: A feasibility study
Connor, Nick; Woodward, Simon; Norwood, Mark; Sturrock, Nigel; Woodward, James; Skelly, Rob; Butterfield, Richard; Lewis, Sarah; Fogarty, Andrew
Authors
Simon Woodward
Mark Norwood
Nigel Sturrock
James Woodward
Rob Skelly
Richard Butterfield
Professor SARAH LEWIS SARAH.LEWIS@NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
Professor of Medical Statistics
ANDREW FOGARTY ANDREW.FOGARTY@NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
Clinical Associate Professor & Reader in Clinical Epidemiology
Abstract
Polypharmacy in older adults is a growing problem, as some drugs may be either unnecessary or even harmful. Admission to hospital under a Medicine for the Elderly specialist physicians represents an opportunity to review patients’ medication. The recent introduction of electronic prescribing to some hospitals in the United Kingdom allows the development of tools to measure polypharmacy in in-patients, and subsequently to assess the efficacy of interventions that aim to optimize medication prescribing. We tested the feasibility of developing an Excel-based software code that measured the number of medications a group of patients were taking at admission and how many of these were still prescribed on discharge. Electronic prescribing data was obtained from the Royal Derby Hospital, over a period of 52 weeks from April 2017 to March 2018 for all patients over the age of 65 years who were admitted onto the medicine for the elderly wards and subsequently discharged. On admission, the median number of eligible medications was 11 (interquartile range IQR 8 to 15). At the time of discharge, the median number of eligible medications retained since admission was 9 (IQR 6 to 12). This represents a median number of medications that have been removed from the current medication regimen of 2 (IQR 1 to 3, p [less than] 0.001). Electronic prescribing software in hospitals allows the development of tools to measure the burden of medications, and to examine the efficacy of future interventions that are developed to optimize drug prescribing in older adults.
Citation
Connor, N., Woodward, S., Norwood, M., Sturrock, N., Woodward, J., Skelly, R., …Fogarty, A. (2020). The potential to quantify polypharmacy in older adult hospital inpatients using electronic prescribing software: A feasibility study. Health and Technology, 10, 823–826. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-020-00419-4
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Mar 10, 2020 |
Online Publication Date | Mar 16, 2020 |
Publication Date | 2020-05 |
Deposit Date | Mar 16, 2020 |
Publicly Available Date | Mar 28, 2024 |
Journal | Health and Technology |
Electronic ISSN | 2190-7188 |
Publisher | Springer Verlag |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 10 |
Pages | 823–826 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-020-00419-4 |
Keywords | Polypharmacy , Older adults, Electronicprescribing, Drugs |
Public URL | https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4153274 |
Publisher URL | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12553-020-00419-4 |
Files
potential to quantify polypharmacy in older adult hospital inpatients
(149 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
You might also like
Risk of Suicide After Dementia Diagnosis
(2022)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Repository@Nottingham
Administrator e-mail: digital-library-support@nottingham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search