Medication use evaluation (MUE) is a quality assurance tool that helps to review a patient’s prescription against a specific set of standards. These standards are prepared by a pool of pharmacists, physicians, nurses, and administrators. Unfortunately, patient registries have been an underused tool for Medication Use Evaluation, and there are many reasons why this should change in the future.
Medication use evaluation is commonly used by hospitals and other healthcare facilities to assess and improve the way these medicines are used. The aim of MUE is to get the best results with safe and effective use of drugs.
Medication use evaluation is an on-going process. There are three stages involved: one is before the drug is prescribed, and the others are during and after the drug is dispensed.
Patient Registries for Medication Use Evaluation
Despite meticulous review by professionals, several unrecognized complications arise from the use of certain medications. The use of some drugs is still questionable because there is lack of evidence (or none at all) supporting their effectiveness.
This is where the information recorded by patient registries can serve as an indispensable tool to mitigate uncertainty between two different medications via MUE, which would entail the best treatment to the patient. MUE plays an immense role in deciphering the efficacy of ambiguous medications. MUEs can help to assess a class of similar drugs and adequately prescribe, prepare, dispense and administer drugs.
How Patient Registries Can Help with Medicine Use Evaluation?
In order to be successful, MUE programs need a structure to support rapid data collection and analysis, followed by relevant changes in practice. How can healthcare settings ensure the completion of this rapid-cycle? Given the quick and fast repository of information of patient registries, it is a surprise why they are still so underused for MUE.
Data collection is a crucial aspect of MUE. However, collection of information requires time, effort and patience and could pose an inconvenience for patients. Poor and inadequate documentation is one of the most common pitfalls of MUE. In order to substitute unreliable paper records with electronic systems, MUE needs a coherent data collection plan that clearly enlists roles to avoid any discrepancy in the MUE plan.
A patient registry is basically an organized system that collects data on a specific population characterized by a particular disease or condition. Recently, observational evidence suggests that patient registries can be used in the benefit-risk evaluation of drugs. Since patient registries allow you to collect data over a significant period of time regarding the progression of the disease and the patient outcome, it can be used as a viable tool in for MUE.
MUE Objectives and Role of Patient Registries
1. Effectiveness of treatment A against effectiveness of treatment B
In order to evaluate the difference in patient outcomes, a patient registry’s vast reserve allows you to pin different therapeutic responses against each other to evaluate the effectiveness of each treatment or an intervention.
2. Clinical Equipoise
Patient registries can fill the gap where there is lack of evidence or conflicting evidence between patient response and case reports.
3. Follow-up Response
Patient registries are commonly used to evaluate patient outcomes, which is why a patient registry would an effective tool to assess the durability of a given treatment and medication as well as signs of treatment failure.
Barriers to Using Patient Registries in Medicines Evaluation
However, despite their significant benefits, they are underused in the regulatory assessment of medicines. This is mainly because there are some barriers to the use of patient registries in this process. These include:
- Existing heterogeneity in patient registries
- Compromised quality of data
- Barriers to sharing data
- Limited collaboration between national and international registries
As a result of these impediments, randomized control trial (RTC) is preferred and widely used by regulators. However, in many situations, RTC data is limited or not feasible, making patient registries relevant for regulatory decision-making, especially with rare disease cases.
Untapped Potential of Patient Registries in Medicine Use Evaluation
Some registries are especially valuable in providing data regarding patient population size and representativeness, follow-up data for patients who have received treatment and availability of this information that is not present in any other real world repositories. Patient Registries can therefore be used for Medication Use Evaluation
Despite such vast potential of patient registries in medicines evaluation, their limited use for this purpose is surprising. Patient registries can be useful for medicines evaluation in that they would provide comparable data between patient outcomes from different treatments and prescriptions across a wide range of countries and healthcare settings over a significant time period. This could help mitigate the potential risks of medicinal products. With patient registries, health settings can collect MUE measures in larger scores of patient, increasing the accuracy of information and consequentially improving patient care and achieving more articulate use and prescription of medicines.
MUE can be best achieved by the following steps.
- Plan: develop a course of action
- Do: Include improvements
- Check: Evaluate results
- Act: Decide what changes are needed
These steps are achievable through a systematic data collection tool that will provide lucid information with several variables. Moreover, Interdisciplinary participation is essential for MUEs. For patient registries to fulfill their role as the most effective tool for MUE, they need a viable patient registry software solution that is flexible enough to allow multiple centers for work simultaneously.
Since MUE is an on-going performance improvement method, a patient registry with the right software will ensure you can seamlessly add more information and continue to improve the effectiveness of this process.
Conclusion
The proposal above allows stakeholders to fully capitalize on the vast potential of patient registries in regulatory decision-making on medicine use evaluation. Of course, for this to be done in an effective manner, it would require the most competent patient registry software solution that is able to provide seamless collaboration between all parties involved.
