Community-based pharmacies: an opportunity to recruit patients?

Excerpt

Recruiting representative population groups with a specific disease is a challenge. In jurisdictions with no existing or no access to a database including individual disease diagnoses (e.g., electronic medical records), there are few satisfying strategies. Usually, population health surveys do not provide enough diagnostic information and may not allow recruiting large enough samples to study a specific disease. Registries or clinical cohorts may exist for specific diseases, but are often not truly population-based. Recruitment from patients’ associations and physicians’ practices may also be selective. In addition, the latter is difficult to run in busy primary care clinics. Finally, the type of information and the possibility to access health insurances’ databases may preclude their use. For diseases that require treatment involving pharmacies regularly, we propose to recruit patients in community pharmacies; this has been seldom described (Knoester et al. 2005; Van Wieren-de Wijer et al. 2009). In the canton of Vaud, Switzerland (~700,000 residents), we have applied such an approach to conduct a survey designed to describe the current population of diabetic patients and to assess the quality of their care. This survey was developed within the framework of a regional diabetes program that started in the summer of 2010 (Hagon-Traub et al. 2010), as one of many such programs implemented to tackle the chronic diseases epidemic (Nolte et al. 2008). …