Impact of collaborative pharmaceutical care on in-patients’ medication safety: study protocol for a stepped wedge cluster randomized trial (MEDREV study)

BACKGROUND: Clinical pharmaceutical care has long played an important role in the improvement of healthcare safety. Pharmaceutical care is a collaborative care approach, implicating all the actors of the medication circuit in order to prevent and correct drug-related problems that can lead to adverse drug events. The collaborative pharmaceutical care performed during patients’ hospitalization requires two mutually reinforcing activities: medication reconciliation and medication review. Until now, the impact of the association of these two activities has not been clearly studied. METHODS: This is a multicentric stepped wedge randomized study involving six care units from six French University Hospitals (each unit corresponding to a cluster) over seven consecutive 14-day periods. Each hospital unit will start with a control period and switch to an experimental period after a randomized number of 14-day periods. Patients aged at least 65 years hospitalized in one of the participating care units and having given their consent to be called for a 30-day and 90-day follow-up can be enrolled. For each 14-day period, 15 patients will be recruited in each care unit to obtain a total of 630 patients enrolled in all centers. Patients with a hospital stay of more than 21 days will be excluded. During the control period, there will be no clinical pharmacist in the care unit, whereas during the experimental period a clinical pharmacist will perform medication reconciliation and review with the healthcare team. The primary outcome will assess the impact of collaborative pharmaceutical care on preventable medication error rate. The secondary outcomes will evaluate the clinical impact of the strategy, the acceptance rate of pharmaceutical interventions, the induced and avoided costs of the strategy (cost-consequence analysis), and the healthcare team’s satisfaction. DISCUSSION: This study will assess the impact of collaborative pharmaceutical care associating medication reconciliation and review at patient admission to hospital in terms of preventable medication error rate and costs. This activity will prevent and correct medication errors arising earlier in the hospitalization. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02598115. Registered on 4 November 2015. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13063-017-2412-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.