Quality of drug treatment in older people: targeting methodological challenges for reliable and valid outcome measures

The goal of this project is to evaluate the hypothesis that a reliable gold standard can be defined to determine drug treatment quality at the patient level, and that indicators of prescribing quality can be developed that validly reflect quality of drug treatment in older populations.

Challenging current research practices, with a person-centred approach instead of starting from experts’ opinions of specific drugs/drug groups, we will perform basic research within a field where such efforts are largely lacking.

To define a reliable gold standard and evaluate, construct and validate indicators of prescribing quality, we will take advantage of two unique data sets including a sufficient number of consecutive/randomly selected patients in primary and hospital care, obtained in our preceding project funded by the Swedish Research Council.

In addition to inter-rater agreement analyses, these data will be linked with register data and analysed using multivariate regression and machine learning methods. The research team consists of skilled researchers, postdocs and PhD students, all with required professional expertise.

If our hypothesis is confirmed, reliable and valid measures will be provided that can be used in interventional and descriptive studies, in the endeavor to achieve rational use of medicines for the benefit of the patients and health care.

If not, the knowledge gained can guide use of the indicators in another direction than to measure quality of drug treatment.