The briefing at Brookings Institution on July 1, “Exploring the Promise of Patient Medication Information”, opened with Mark McClellan MD, PhD, a Senior Fellow and Director of the Initiative on Value and Innovation in Health Care at Brookings, saying, “He wants to see health IT expand, consumers more empowered, and healthcare more personalized.”
The speakers taking part in the briefing agreed that in order to meet today’s healthcare demands, it is important to be able to integrate health IT and modern care delivery so that patients and consumers can proactively interface with their health information. It is important for patients to have access to trusted, accurate, clear, and understandable information on medications.
This can be accomplished by using physical documents provided by a prescriber or pharmacist and/or provide access to documents electronically. It is important for patient medication information to be in a consistent format and reach people across all literacy levels.
Initially, through an agreement with FDA, the Engleberg Center for Health Care Reform at Bookings held a series of workshops starting in 2010 that focused on implementing and evaluating the Patient Medication Initiative (PMI) in place to make medical information given to the consumer readable. Guiding principles established that PMI content should be consumer friendly, use a simple format, easy to navigate, and provide multiple channels of distribution.
Today, so much information goes with individuals when picking up their prescriptions. Including patient package inserts developed by manufacturers and approved by FDA, consumer medication information written by a pharmacy or a third party that is not FDA-reviewed or approved, and medication guides with information developed by manufacturers to inform patients that the medication may pose a serious and significant public health concern which is also reviewed and approved by FDA.
As reported, a high percentage of people do not even look at the information provided with their prescriptions and very often just throw the medication material out. As a result, as many as half of all American adults find it difficult to comprehend and act upon health information. Therefore the current method for dispensing medication information is not working.
The panel held at Brookings discussed the lessons learned from PMI projects. The discussion centered on various studies that have been or are currently being conducted at FDA, Concentrics, Northwestern University, Duke University, Adheris, and Brookings.
Ruth Day PhD a Professor at Duke University and the Director of the Medical Cognition Laboratory is doing a great deal of research examining basic cognitive processes involving memory, comprehension, and language problem solving. She also researches medical cognition to study how patients and professionals understand, remember, and use medical information especially about drugs.
As Professor Day explained, “Individuals do have preferences on how they want to receive information on their medications. For instance, the information can be distributed by print, an internet link can be provided, consumers can go to the internet and search for their information, and receive information by email, or receive the information on their cell phones.
Gregory Daniel, PhD, Managing Director for Evidence Development and Innovation at Brookings is working with the National Library of Medicine to find ways to engage with pharmacies and EHRs to incorporate PMI documents into an online central repository.
As Dr Daniel stated, “The online central repository will need to allow single documents to be retrieved, must enable the full PMI library to be downloaded, integrate information into EMRs, and must actively push through links to mobile apps or to the patient’s email.”
For more information, go to www.brookings.edu.