Doctors and pharmacists treating people with blood thinners can reduce the rate of inappropriate dosing -; as well as blood clots and strokes that can result from it -; using an electronic patient management system, a study suggests. The online dashboard, developed by the United States Veterans Health Administration in 2016, was designed to highlight and optimize the treatment of patients with direct oral anticoagulants, or DOACs, the most commonly prescribed blood thinners. Researchers led by Michigan Medicine used the tool to assess over 120,000 cases in which patients with atrial fibrillation or venous thromboembolism, blood clots in the veins, were treated with DOACs at 123 VA hospitals from mid-2015 through 2019.
They found that between 6.9 and 8.6% of patients received incorrect prescriptions for blood thinners.
Adoption of the electronic DOAC patient management tool led to a decline in off-label dosing of around 8%. The rate of blood clots and stroke also declined at every hospital that implemented the monitoring tool. Results are published in the Journal of the American Heart Association .
While DOACs are lifesaving medications for patients with common thrombotic conditions, they can also cause serious harm when prescribed inappropriately." Geoffrey Barnes, M.D.
, M.Sc., Study First Author and Associate Professor, Cardiology-Internal Medicine, University of Michigan Medical School He added, "Not only does our study show how commonly off-label dosing of DOACs occurs, bu.