Developing and Piloting a Deprescribing Mobile App

Award Date: 2018

Project Lead(s): Tammie Quast

Project Title: Developing and Piloting a Deprescribing Mobile App

Deprescribing is an important innovation that ensures medication efficacy and reduces harms by reducing doses or stopping medications that are no longer needed or may be causing harm. We have published five different deprescribing guidelines (and accompanying algorithms) that can be used by healthcare professionals to help them decide when and how to reduce medications safely and how to monitor their effect. While these guidelines are available online as PDFs to be viewed or printed, this is not always convenient for busy healthcare professionals while they are caring for patients.  We are developing these tools into an interactive smartphone application (app) so they will be easy to use at patients’ bedsides and in pharmacies. The development of four out of five of the guidelines is currently underway, and they will become a “channel” on an existing app for medical guidelines. This project has two goals. First, we will develop the fifth deprescribing guideline into an interactive app format.  Second, we will conduct a pilot test of the Deprescribing Channel to determine the value of the channel to healthcare professionals, including its impact on practice, relevance, use for specific patients, and anticipated benefits. Providing access to deprescribing information in a manner that is efficient, at the point of care and valued by healthcare professionals will ultimately help change the culture and practice of prescribers to more often re-evaluate the need for ongoing medication and to reduce and stop it when appropriate.