Preventing medicine related emergency department visits in people with renal impairment
Project Participants
Status: Ongoing
Opportunity
Use data to improve medicine selection and dosing for patients suffering renal impairment.
Project objective
This 3-year project investigates using medicine databases to create an accurate renal dosage decision support tool for primary care. Delivered as a set of clinically valid rules, this calculator can be implemented by different software applications, including prescribing and dispensing software, and will be piloted in remote primary care settings in the Northern Territory.
Inappropriate medicine dosing for renal impaired patients in primary care is part of medication-related problems responsible for 250,000 hospital admissions annually, with an annual cost of $1.4 billion, of which 50% is preventable.
The solution will involve an iterative and collaborative approach to achieve results that accurately reflect current prescription patterns. The results will include an explicit recommendation of opportunities to change the current system and an estimation of cost savings.