Background: Polypharmacy and inappropriate medication prescriptions are associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Most interventions proposed to improve appropriate prescribing are time and resource intensive and therefore hardly applicable in daily clinical practice.~Objective: To test the efficacy of an easy-to-use checklist aimed at supporting the therapeutic reasoning of physicians in order to reduce inappropriate prescribing and polypharmacy.~Design: single-center, interventional, quasi-experimental before-after study. Patients: Consecutive patients aged ≥65 years, hospitalized in the division of internal medicine of a Swiss secondary-level hospital from September to November 2012 (control group, N=450) and from September to November 2013 (intervention group, N=450).~Intervention: Introduction of a 5-point checklist to be used by all physicians on the internal medicine wards.~Main Measures: The proportion of patients with prescription of potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) at discharge, according to Screening tool of older people's prescriptions (STOPP) criteria, and the number of prescribed medications at discharge, before and after the introduction of the checklist. Secondary outcomes were the prevalence of polypharmacy (≥ 5 drugs) and hyperpolypharmacy (≥ 10 drugs), and the prevalence of potentially inappropriate prescribing omissions (PPOs) according to START criteria.
This study tested the efficacy of an easy-to-use checklist aimed at supporting the therapeutic reasoning of physicians in order to reduce inappropriate prescribing and polypharmacy in elderly adults admitted to an internal medicine unit.