Potentially Inappropriate Medication Use in Older Adults in the Preoperative Period: A Retrospective Study of a Noncardiac Surgery Cohort.

BACKGROUND: Few studies have evaluated the prevalence of potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) and its association with postoperative outcomes in a geriatric population in the preoperative setting. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of PIMs in an older elective surgery population and to explore associations between PIMs and postoperative length of stay (LOS) and emergency department (ED) visits in the 90 days post hospital discharge, depending on frailty status. METHODOLOGY: We performed a retrospective cohort study of older adults awaiting major elective noncardiac surgery and undergoing an evaluation in the preoperative clinic at a tertiary academic center between 2017 and 2018. We identified PIMs using MedSafer, a software tool built to improve the safety of prescribing. Frailty status was assessed using the 7-point Clinical Frailty Scale. We estimated the association between PIMs and postoperative LOS and ED visits in the 90 days post hospital discharge. RESULTS: The MedSafer software generated 394 recommendations on PIMs in 1619 medications for 252 patients. In total, 197 (78%) patients had at least one PIM. The cohort included 138 (51%) robust, 87 (32.2%) vulnerable and 45 (16.7%) frail patients. The association between PIMs and LOS was not significant for the robust and frail subgroups. For the vulnerable patients, every additional PIM increased LOS by 20% (incidence rate ratio 1.20; 95% confidence interval 0.90-1.44; p = 0.089) without reaching statistical significance. No association was found between PIMs and ED visits. CONCLUSION: PIMs identified by the MedSafer software were prevalent. Preoperative evaluation represents an opportunity to plan deprescribing of PIMs.

The Opportunities and Challenges of Pragmatic Randomized Trials Using a Specialized Software: CloudTrials Project.

Pragmatic randomized trials are essential to improve knowledge of real world clinical practice. Pragmatic trials design reflect routine clinical care, which have advantages to initiate and conduct, compared to classical clinical trials. Trials help to: engage bedside clinicians, increase efficiency of patient recruitment and follow up, minimize loss to follow up and include technological patient reported outcomes. The objective is to describe the opportunities and challenges designing a specialized software to administrate pragmatic randomized trials.