![\"News](\"https:\/\/media.healthday.com\/Images\/icimages\/artery_plaque.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
FRIDAY, Oct. 9, 2020 (HealthDay News)<\/p>\n
Prescriptions of cholesterol<\/a>-lowering statins<\/a> for heart disease<\/a> patients rose significantly when doctors were prompted to choose whether or not to order them, according to a new study.<\/p>\n It included 82 cardiologists and more than 11,000 patients. Doctors randomly received one of two “nudges,” or notifications, in their patients’ electronic health records.<\/p>\n One was a “passive choice” notification to which doctors would navigate. The other was an “active choice” notification to prescribe a certain dose of statins<\/a> that doctors needed to accept or dismiss.<\/p>\n The nudges flagged patients with heart disease<\/a> or those who were at risk for it. Each nudge also suggested the best dose of statins based on patients’ information.<\/p>\n Some doctors didn’t receive any nudge and acted as a control group in the six-month study.<\/p>\n Among doctors who received active nudges, there was a 4 percentage point increase in optimal statin prescribing in patients with heart disease<\/a>, according to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine study.<\/p>\n However, there was no significant difference in prescribing rates for those patients at risk of heart<\/a> disease but did not yet have it.<\/p>\n “Active choice prompts are used commonly in electronic health records, but they often are not rigorously tested head-to-head against other approaches,” said senior author Dr. Mitesh Patel, director of Penn Medicine’s Nudge Unit.<\/p>\n “By systematically testing these interventions we can build upon the approaches that do work and turn off the ones that don’t,” he said in a university news release.<\/p>\n First author Dr. Srinath Adusumalli said active choice prompts led to small increases in prescribing statins for patients at highest risk — those who already had plaque buildup in their arteries.<\/p>\n “These are the types of patients who stand to benefit the most from statin therapy with regard to reduction in major adverse cardiovascular events, like a heart attack<\/a>, and mortality,” said Adusumalli, an assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine.<\/p>\n The study findings were published Oct. 7 in the journal JAMA Cardiology<\/i>.<\/p>\n — Robert Preidt<\/p>\n![\"MedicalNews\"](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/HealthDay\/healthday.png\")
Copyright \u00a9 2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/quiz\/brain\/brain-s1-human-brain-weigh.jpg\"\/)