Physician Response to Pharmacist Statin Therapy Recommendations for Type 2 Diabetes Patients

Abstract

Specific Aims: To determine if the response rate will be greater than the 14% response rate that was shown in the AUDIT study in 2006. The rationale is since statin therapy is recommended as part of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) guidelines, physicians will be more open to the suggestion and the response rate will be higher. Our secondary analysis is that at least an additional 5% of patients will be on statin therapy even though their physician did not respond to the fax. The rationale is that even though a physician may not respond to us via fax, they may be prompted to evaluate statin therapy for their patient and write a prescription for statin therapy. Subjects: Using Albertson’s pharmacy database, patients between the ages of 40 to 75 on metformin were filtered. Methods: This before/after study with independent groups used data obtained from a manual fax and compared the response to a previous study that was done in 2006. Main Results: A total of 26 faxes were sent out to providers notifying them that their patient qualified for statin therapy. A total of 4 responses were received with 1 patient that was appropriately initiated on statin therapy. Conclusions: There were no differences in physician response rates in our study compared to the AUDIT study with recommending statin therapy in patients 40 to 75 with type 2 diabetes mellitus that qualify for statin therapy per ADA guidelines.