Source: NPR
A drug called Seroquel was approved by the FDA a couple of years ago, and now some U.S. doctors have been over-prescribing the drug to patients who are vulnerable to death when taking the drug. In many cases, the drug increased risk of death for patients with dementia.
Researchers conducted an experiment to convince doctors who were identified as overprescribing the drug to limit how much they were prescribing the patients.
In collaboration with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the researchers sent out letters to more than 5,000 medical practitioners, informing them that they had been prescribing the drug more than the average doctor. They were sent 3 letters of a six-month period.
The outcome was that these doctors starting prescribing the (sometimes) deadly drug much less frequently after the letters. Researchers found prescriptions of the drug dropped by 16 percent.
Read Full Story: NPR