Consumer Understanding and Use of Medication Guides

'Medication Guides' (Med Guides) are industry-developed documents that have been required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be issued to consumers for prescription medications that have been viewed to possess "serious and significant public health concerns" since 1998.1,2 These materials for consumers are intended to 1) provide specific dosing administration instructions that could prevent serious adverse effects associated with taking the medication, 2) warn individuals about significant health risks that could affect one's decision to take the medication, or 3) underscore the importance of taking the prescribed medication to the patient's health, and the need for proper adherence.

Despite their potential value in communicating safe and appropriate medication use, problems are clearly evident with the current template for Med Guides. Research conducted by this team in 2006 showed that the majority, if not all Med Guides dispensed with prescribed medicines are too complex and written at a reading grade level not suitable for the majority of patients to comprehend. As a result, these materials are usually ignored by consumers.3 Further research by this team investigating consumers' ability to process and correctly understand content contained in existing Med Guides found that, across all literacy levels, current Med Guides are poorly understood and ineffective in conveying safety information. Patients with low literacy comprehended significantly less, proving yet again that industry standards must be applied to improve these documents.

It is clear that the current guidance for Medication Guide development is insufficient, and the FDA is working to change that. Both the FDA and this research team have proposed multiple new Medication Guide formats, most of which are one-page cover sheets that highlight the most important information of the medication. To examine these new prototypes, this research team conducted six focus groups to obtain consumer-based feedback, and then evaluated three of the prototypes in an eye tracking study. Using the collective data from these two consumer-based studies, the investigators have further developed patient-centered and evidence-based Med Guide prototypes that will be more user-friendly, clear, usable, and low literacy appropriate.

In a cross-sectional, controlled trial, the investigators will investigate consumers' ability to process and correctly understand content contained in each of these top three new, redesigned prototypes.

The purpose of this research is to better understand how well people with varying levels of literacy understand information contained in three newly designed Med Guides. Through an in-person interview, the investigators aim to test consumers' ability to comprehend information contained in the guides by asking them retrieval and inference questions over the guides' content. This will allow us to compare the three formats against each other to see which prototype is most efficient in conveying the important information it is intended to convey. The investigators will recruit a total of 600 participants from general internal medicine clinics here in Chicago (Northwestern clinic = 300 participants and University of Illinois Chicago = 300 participants. A UIC RA will be responsible for this recruitment and will submit their own IRB for review).

This trial will field test our enhanced prototypes and allow us to compare them to each other, showing which format is best understood, especially in participants with low literacy.