Exploring the Requisites and Design Requirements for Adding ‘Reason for Use’ Information to Prescription Labels

Abstract

Individuals with multiple medical conditions and polypharmacy are at higher risk of inappropriate prescribing and consequent adverse drug events. Moreover, individuals may not adequately understand the therapeutic intention of their medications as this information is conveyed to patients inconsistently from their healthcare providers. One way to address this problem is to inform the patient of the reason for using a prescribed medication. The present research is an initial attempt to design a prescription label that incorporates Reason for Use (RFU) by first understanding how patients are currently receiving RFU information, their feelings of being provided with that information in a future health care system, and secondly, exploring their design preferences for this newly designed prescription label. Twenty patients (10 female; 10 male) throughout the Kitchener-Waterloo region were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire and 15 (9 female; 6 male) of these individuals participated in a design workshop that aimed to understand where the RFU information should be placed on a prescription label, the amount of detail, language, and overall layout of the label. Participant responses were analyzed thoroughly to discover important and/or frequent themes. Results from the study revealed that all 20 patients are in favor of having RFU information shared with their pharmacist and overall, would feel more informed if they were provided with RFU information from their healthcare providers. Results from the design workshop revealed that patients preferred RFU information printed in one to three words (80%) with its placement underneath the dosage instructions (33.3%) and/or next to the drug name (46.7%) because it felt the most ‘logical’ (73.3%). The participants showed a high preference for adding RFU to the prescription label for sake of being better-informed and more capable of participating fully in health decisions. Results from this study suggest a need for including RFU into the Ontario medication prescribing practices and adopting recently released United States Pharmacopeia (USP) patient-centered prescription label standards, which also include adding RFU to the labels.