Usman Iqbal and Yu-Chuan (Jack) Li
Taipei Medical University, Taiwan
Title: Irrational antibiotics prescribing behavior of physicians in Taiwan
Biography
Biography: Usman Iqbal and Yu-Chuan (Jack) Li
Abstract
Irrational and imprudent antibiotics prescribing for acute bronchitis is a greater concern in globally. We got interested to see the whether the policy implication for antibiotics prescription on Taiwanese physicians would influenced in following years or not. We analyzed the antibiotics prescribing trends for acute bronchitis by using 1 million population cohort data from Taiwan’s Bureau National Health Insurance Database of 1998-2011 years. We selected all subjects who visited with acute bronchitis and presence of antibiotics prescription for 18-44 and 45-64 age and sex groups. The patients who were admitted to the hospital or visits associated with chronic pulmonary disease, immunodeficiency, cancer, or concomitant infectious diagnoses were excluded from the study. We found a total of 257446 visits for acute bronchitis who met our study inclusion criteria. We take into account the specialty or settings such as medical center, area hospital, local hospital and non-evaluation hospitals as well as the region of the hospitals Taipei, Northern, Central, Southern, Pingtung and Eastern to mimic the bias. We observed that the overall antibiotic prescription rate was 33•0%. However, the actual antibiotic prescription rate was observed 57•0% for years 1998 to 2001. From 2002 the results showed that there was a significant reduction in the antibiotic prescription to 28•2%. Our results provided an evidence that the new laws and regulations introduced for reimbursement purposes by BNHI Taiwan in 2001 related to upper respiratory tract infections, discouraged physicians from prescribing antibiotics if it is not proven by a bacterial infection through blood examination. The behavioral change was observed up to 20% patients with proven bacterial infection.