LabAlert: Enhancing Medication Safety Through Electronic Interventions to Improve Medication Safety

Many of the medications that clinicians prescribe to prevent or treat disease can result in unanticipated and unintended toxic effects. Many national clinical guidelines recommend baseline and periodic laboratory monitoring to avoid adverse drug events. Our Safety in Prescribing project (SIP) has found many significant gaps in medication safety. Lab Alert will evaluate electronic tools to improve Kaiser Permanente's performance in laboratory monitoring to avoid adverse drug events. We will enroll patients who are taking high-risk medications and who have not received laboratory monitoring. The primary outcome of this 2-year study is the proportion of patients who receive guideline-based laboratory monitoring at 1 and 3 weeks post-intervention.

Fifteen primary care clinics will be randomly assigned to: (1) usual care (UC) (2) electronic message reminder (EMR) (3) automated voice message (AVM) (4) pharmacy outreach team (Pharmacy). The reminders will notify of the patient's need for guideline-specified laboratory testing due to medication use. Using electronic data, patients with PCPs assigned to intervention clinics who are on study-specified medications will be identified and screened for exclusions, to yield 600 patients (200 per intervention group). Patients will be assigned to the treatment groups on the basis of the condition assigned to their usual clinic. After the intervention and observation periods, and using the same time frame and inclusion and exclusion criteria used to identify the patients in the intervention arms, we will retrospectively identify a comparison 200-patient cohort in the usual care clinics. Thus, approximately 800 patients will be included in the study. Baseline, follow-up, and outcome data will be obtained from electronic records.

Study-defined medications will be finalized by the study team and quality committees. These medications are identified based upon previous work and are prescribed with reasonable frequency, commonly have gaps in laboratory monitoring, carry significant risk of toxicity, and are of interest to the participating HMOs because of prior and potential adverse events. We anticipate focusing on baseline monitoring for new prescriptions. New starts will be defined as patients with an index prescription but no other dispense of that medication in the prior 6 months.

Lab Alert will assess the effectiveness of a patient-specific electronic medical record (EMR) in-basket reminder to the primary care provider (PCP) (EMR reminder), an automated recorded voice message to the patient (AVM), pharmacy team outreach (Pharmacy) to increase the proportion of patients receiving all guideline-based laboratory monitoring, when compared to usual care (UC). If any intervention is better than UC, Lab Alert will assess and compare their effectiveness and costs. The study also will evaluate PCP and patient experiences with the intervention in order to refine the interventions in the future.