Objectives: Health insurers, physicians, and patients worldwide need information on the comparative effectiveness and safety of prescription drugs in routine care. Nonrandomized studies of treatment effects using secondary databases may supplement the evidence based from randomized clinical trials and prospective observational studies. Recognizing the challenges to conducting valid retrospectiv...

OBJECTIVE To determine the public health benefits of making nicotine replacement therapy available without prescription, in terms of number of quitters and life expectancy. DESIGN A decision-analytic model was developed to compare the policy of over-the-counter (OTC) availability of nicotine replacement therapy with that of prescription ([symbol: see text]) availability for the adult smoking ...

medication errors and adverse drug events can bring about hospitalization, permanent injury, or death. patients due to lack of adequate understanding of instruction may unintentionally misuse a prescribed medicine. the aims of the study were to examine whether patients with low back pain were correctly able to understand physician's instructions regarding drug use and also to identify influenci...

implementation of electronic prescribing system can overcome many problems of the paper prescribing system, and provide numerous opportunities of more effective and advantageous prescribing. successful implementation of such a system requires complete and deep understanding of work content, human force, and workflow of paper prescribing. the current study was designed in order to model the curr...

conclusions our results suggested that the prevalence of prescription drugs, alcohol and illicit substance use was relatively low, though still significant, among iranian students, which was strongly associated with family and friends’ use. the findings of this research can be used for planning and evaluating interventions by considering the risk factors and protective factors in universities. ...

background and aim: giving improper prescriptions is common among medical practitioners, mostly graduates, in most communities even developed countries. so far, to our knowledge, no study has been conducted on prescription writing of graduate midwifery students. therefore, this study aimed to detect prescription writing errors of midwifery students in common gynecological problems. methods: in ...

one hundred and fifteen prescriptions which were purposely written in toxic and potentially fatal dose of different medicine (mainly digitoxin) were sent to pharmacies throughout iran. all pharmacies filled up the prescription and only one pharmacist made notice of dangerous dose. the pharmacist in the drugstores in iran is forcefully employed by the owner of the pharmacy which is required by l...

the goal of this study is to identify the types of potentially inappropriate drugs prescribed by the medical specialists of isfahan province to elderly patients. a number of 31,254 randomly selected prescriptions from medical specialists of isfahan province were reviewed for elderly patients who were insured by the social security organization. three thousand and seven prescriptions were identi...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to use administrative claims data to identify and analyze patient characteristics and behavior associated with diagnosed opioid abuse. DESIGN Patients, aged 12-64 years, with at least one prescription opioid claim during 2007-2009 (n = 821,916) were selected from a de-identified administrative claims database of privately insured members (n = 8,316,66...

BACKGROUND Substance use is associated with sexual risk behaviors among youth, but little is known about whether nonmedical prescription drug use, an increasingly common behavior, is associated with sexual risk behaviors. METHODS Data from the 2011 and 2013 national Youth Risk Behavior Surveys, cross-sectional surveys conducted among nationally representative samples of students in grades 9 t...