Assist Patients with Medication Decisions

描述(由申请人提供)： 数百万患者服用处方药、非处方药(OTC)和膳食补充剂。在改善健康的愿望、自我用药的便利性和相对较低的成本、对天然产品安全性的假设以及对医生处方治疗的不满等多种因素的推动下，许多患者寻求非处方药。在自我用药时，患者和医生一样，评估症状，评估选择，并做出决定。大多数患者不愿服用已知无效或有害的药物。然而，患者并不总是了解他们服用的产品的适应症、副作用和禁忌症。事实上，最近的患者调查发现，大多数潜在的药物-药物相互作用涉及非处方药。我们认为，有必要通过主动向患者提供及时的、相关的、可理解的和可操作的信息来帮助患者做出关于自我用药的更知情的决定。这项拟议的研究将调查患者需要哪些疗效和安全信息以及如何向患者展示这些信息，开发一种自我用药决策支持工具，以警告患者潜在的无效或有害使用，并建议更安全和更有效的替代方案，并评估患者对决策支持的反应。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Millions of patients take prescription drugs, over the counter (OTC) drugs, and dietary supplements. Driven by a variety of factors such as the desire to improve health, the convenience and relative low cost of self- medication, the assumption of natural products' safety, and the dissatisfaction with physician-prescribed treatments, many patients seek non-prescription drugs. When self-medicating, patients, like physicians, assess symptoms, evaluate options, and make decisions. Most patients would not willingly take medications that are known to be ineffective or harmful. Patients, however, do not always understand the indication, side effects, and contraindications of the products they take. Indeed, recent patient surveys found that the majority of potential drug-drug interactions involve non-prescription drugs. We argue that it is necessary to help patients make better-informed decisions regarding self-medication by proactively providing them with timely, relevant, comprehensible, and actionable information. The propose study will investigate what efficacy and safety information patients need and how to present that information to patients, develop a self-medication decision support tool to warn patients of potentially ineffective or harmful usage and suggest safer and more effective alternatives, and evaluate patient response to the decision support.