Community Pharmacy Use Patterns of Women with HIV and Women at Risk for HIV in the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

Background:

Community pharmacies play a key role in the care of patients when dispensing antiretroviral therapy.

Objective:

To determine factors associated with the use of multiple dispensing pharmacies to obtain medications in a population of HIV-positive and at-risk women and to determine whether use of multiple pharmacies was associated with immunologic or virologic changes for the subset of HIV-positive women.

Methods:

A survey on community pharmacy use was distributed to participants in the Women's Interagency HIV Study, San Francisco site, from 2004–2007. Poisson, linear, and logistic regression methods were used to determine associations between specific patient characteristics and use of multiple dispensing pharmacies and associations between multiple pharmacy use and CD4+ cell count or viral load changes.

Results:

There was a trend toward an association between HIV status and use of multiple pharmacies (IRR 1.23; 95% CI 1.00 to 1.51; p = 0.05). In multivariable analyses of HIV-positive women, use of additional pharmacies (over the primary pharmacy) during the study period was not associated with statistically significant changes in CD4+ count or viral load.

Conclusions:

HIV-positive participants may tend to use multiple pharmacies more frequently than their HIV-negative counterparts do, though this practice does not appear to be associated with poorer immunologic or virologic outcomes. Further studies should be conducted to determine whether different patient patterns of community pharmacy use affect HIV treatment outcomes.