Is organisational social capital in general practices a predictor for inappropriate variation in lipid lowering therapy among patients with newly detected type 2 Diabetes?

Abstract

Huge and inappropriate variations in redeemed prescriptions of lipid lowering treatment for people with screen detected diabetes have been found in general practices in Denmark. These variations are associated with cardiovascular morbidity and all-cause mortality. Organisational social capital (OSC) is a measure of the ability of members of an organisation to collaborate when solving its key task. Thus OSC could be a predictive factor for fulfilments of treatment goals in general practice. OSC have been measured in Danish general practices in 2011. These measurements are hosted in University of Southern Denmark, Faculty of Health Sciences, Institute of Public Health, Research Unit for General Practice. The overall aim of this study is to explore a possible association between OSC (explanatory variable) and the quality of lipid lowering medicine (LLM) (outcome variable) among patients with newly detected type 2 diabetes in general practice naive for LLM before diagnosis.

Therefor we apply for data from DD2 in order to link OSC measures as explanatory variable for variation in lipid lowering treatment expressed as the proportion of patients with type 2 diabetes who have redeemed at least 3 prescriptions within the first 2 years of diagnosis according to the DD2 register.   

Formål

1. To describe the variation between practices in redeemed prescription of LLM within the first two years following the diagnosis of T2DM.

2. To explore if an association can be found between OSC in general practices and variation in redeemed prescriptions of LLM.

Studiepopulation

Inclusion criteria: General practices in Denmark and their patients with newly diagnosed T2DM naïve of LLM.
Exclusion criteria: General practices not registered in the DD2 database and practices who have not answered the OSC questioner surveys.