A simulation trial evaluating ABiMed, a clinical decision support system for medication reviews and polypharmacy management

BACKGROUND: Medication review is a structured interview of the patient, performed by the pharmacist and aimed at optimizing drug treatments. In practice, medication review is a long and cognitively-demanding task that requires specific knowledge. Various tools and criteria have been proposed, but their application is tedious. METHODS: We designed ABiMed, a clinical decision support system for medication reviews. The design was supported by literature reviews and clinicians focus groups. ABiMed supports the pharmacist by implementing the STOPP/START v2 criteria and by presenting aggregated drug knowledge, such as dosage, interactions or adverse effects, visually using tables, graphs and flower glyphs. We evaluated ABiMed with 39 community pharmacists during a simulation trial, each pharmacist performing a medication review for two fictitious patients without ABiMed, and two others with ABiMed. We recorded the problems identified by the pharmacist, the interventions proposed, the response time, the perceived usability and the comments. Pharmacists' medication reviews were compared to an expert-designed gold standard. RESULTS: With ABiMed, pharmacists found 1.6 times more relevant drug-related problems during the medication review (p < 0.0001) and proposed better interventions (p < 0.0001), without needing more time (p = 0.56). The System Usability Scale score is 82.7, which is ranked "excellent". In their comments, pharmacists appreciated the visual aspect of ABiMed and its ability to compare the current treatment with the proposed one. A multifactor analysis showed no difference in the support offered by ABiMed according to the pharmacist's age or sex, in terms of percentage of problems identified or quality of the proposed interventions. CONCLUSIONS: The use of an intelligent and visual clinical decision support system can help pharmacists when they perform medication reviews. Our main perspective is the evaluation of the system with real patients, and its diffusion among pharmacists.