engleski

Studies of Drug Utilization

The growing pressures on all healthcare systems with aging populations, rising patient expectations, stricter clinical targets, and expensive new medicines have increased the need for drug utilization studies to monitor that resources are used wisely and new medicines are prescribed to those who may benefit most from them. Drug utilization research can be defined as “an eclectic collection of descriptive and analytic methods for the quantification, understanding and evaluation of the processes of prescribing, dispensing, and consumption of medicines and for the testing of interventions to enhance the quality of these processes.” This definition includes both quantitative and qualitative research methods. This chapter focuses on the current status of descriptive epidemiologic approaches to the study of the processes of drug utilization and analytic studies on factors associated with drug utilization patterns. Examples are given from a range of studies on, e.g., prescribing behavior, patient adherence, and cross‐national comparisons of drug utilization. In the chapter, important concepts for drug utilization researchers are also presented, such as data sources, classification systems, measurement units, quality indicators, and intervention studies to improve the quality of medicine use. The growth of computerized databases has greatly facilitated studies of drug utilization. Today, there is a rapid growth of data coming from other sources which may offer many future opportunities to get a better understanding of drug utilization.

drug utilization

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