Urgent care visits commonly result in inappropriate prescriptions of antibiotics, glucocorticoids or opioids, according to a letter in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Michigan Medicine researchers examined commercial and Medicare Supplemental databases to study 22,426,546 urgent care visits, which resulted in 2,783,924 (12.4%) antibiotic, 2,038,506 (9.1%) glucocorticoid, and 299,210 (1.3%) opioid prescriptions.
In each category, they identified a substantial number of prescriptions that were filled despite being “never appropriate” or “generally inappropriate” given the patients’ diagnoses.
“Previous studies had shown that patients continue to receive antibiotics for diagnoses where they may not be indicated, such as for a viral respiratory infection, especially in urgent care settings,” said Shirley Cohen-Mekelburg, M.D., M.S., assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and co-lead author on the article.
“Our findings reveal that this trend of inappropriate prescribing includes other classes of drugs—including glucocorticoids—and a variety of conditions.”
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