A study suggests that an electronic patient management system can reduce the rate of inappropriate dosing of blood thinners, which can cause blood clots and strokes.
The online dashboard used was “designed to highlight and optimize the treatment of patients with direct oral anticoagulants, or DOACs, the most commonly prescribed blood thinners.” Among over 120,000 cases in which patients with atrial fibrillation or venous thromboembolism “were treated with DOACs at 123 VA hospitals from mid-2015 through 2019,” researchers found that “between 6.9 and 8.6% of patients received incorrect prescriptions for blood thinners.”
Adopting the DOAC electronic patient management tool led to a “decline in off-label dosing of around 8%.” The rate of blood clots and strokes also declined “at every hospital that implemented the monitoring tool.”
Direct oral anticoagulants “can be incorrectly prescribed up to 20% of the time.” The two most prescribed DOACs are rivaroxaban and apixaban.
