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The Thai Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Abstract

Background: The National Health Security Office (NHSO) has set up the “Rational Drug Use Clinics (RDU)” network to promote the rational use of drugs in community care clinics in Bangkok. Objectives: The objective of the study was to evaluate the effects of educational and financial interventions of antibiotic (ATBs) use in community care clinics in Bangkok. Materials and Methods: A quasi-experimental study, a time series analysis, was conducted. Aggregate weekly prescribing data were extracted from the NHSO Medical Claims Database from October 2013 to September 2019. The Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model was utilized to assess intervention effects on the quality of drug use. Five outcomes were measured. Results: ATBs utilization was significantly impacted by the financial intervention (P = 0.004). The percentage of ATBs encounters and drug costs spent on ATBs were impacted by the educational intervention (P = 0.0017, P = 0.001, respectively). The percentage of prescriptions that met the guidelines and the average medicine cost per encounter were not significantly impacted by the interventions. Conclusions: The “RDUs” project was partially effective in improving the quality of drug use in terms of ATB utilization, prescriptions, and costs. The continuation of the qualitative study was supposed to explain why and how interventions affected the quality of drug use.

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