Abstract
Background
The medication appropriateness index (MAI) has demonstrated reliability in selected outpatient clinics where medical data were easily accessible from medical charts. However, its use in the community setting where patient data may be limited has not been examined.
Objective
To evaluate the usefulness of a modified MAI for use in the community pharmacy setting by testing interrater reliability using 3 different rating schemes.
Methods
Two raters evaluated 160 medications for 32 elderly ambulatory patients. Patient information was acquired using community pharmacist-collected medication histories. A summated MAI score, percent agreement, κ, positive agreement, negative agreement, and intraclass correlation coefficient were calculated for each criterion using 3 scoring schemes. A paired samples t-test (95% CI) was used to test interrater reliability.
Results
The κ statistics were >0.75 for indication and effectiveness, but good (0.41–0.66) for the remaining criteria using the Hanlon scoring scheme. The intraclass coefficients (0.82, 0.86, 0.87) and overall κ (0.65, 0.66, 0.61) were similar for the 3 schemes.
Conclusions
This study suggests that the modified MAI has the potential to detect medication appropriateness and inappropriateness in the community pharmacy setting; however, it is not without limitations. Because the MAI has the most clinimetric and psychometric data available, the instrument should be studied further to increase its reliability and generalizability.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.