Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
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Non-adherence is a major problem among patients with chronic diseases. Community pharmacists are ideally positioned to detect non-adherence and to provide patient-centred interventions. ⋯ Pharmacist-led intervention can improve LLM adherence, but its influence on clinical outcomes, including lipid level control, remains to be clarified.
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Assessing the performance of diagnostic tests requires evaluation of the amount of diagnostic uncertainty a test reduces. Statistical measures, such as sensitivity and specificity, currently dominating the evidence-based medicine (EBM) and related fields, cannot explicitly measure this reduction in diagnostic uncertainty. Mutual information (MI), an information theory statistic, explicitly quantifies diagnostic uncertainty by measuring information gain before vs after diagnostic testing. In this paper, we propose the use of MI as a single measure to express diagnostic test performance and demonstrate how it can be used in the meta-analysis of diagnostic test studies. ⋯ We have demonstrated the suitability of MI in assessing the performance of diagnostic tests, which can facilitate easier interpretation of the true utility of diagnostic tests. Similarly, to the guidance for interpretation of effect size of treatment interventions, we also propose the guidelines for interpretation of the utility of diagnostic tests based on the magnitude of reduction in diagnostic uncertainty.