Congruence of Medication Information from a Brown Bag Data Collection and Pharmacy Records: Findings from the Seattle Longitudinal Study

Abstract

The validity of health information obtained through participants' reports of current medications (e.g., the brown bag method) is an important, but under-studied, area. In the current study, we examined the congruence of medication reports from a brown bag data collection with the pharmacy prescription records for 1430 participants (ages 23 to 97 years) of the seventh wave of the Seattle Longitudinal Study. Overall, the congruence of the brown bag data and pharmacy records was high. Congruence was better for younger participants, healthier participants, and for medications taken for serious conditions or on a regular basis. When the focus is on assessing participants' medications at a specific point in time (e.g., on the day of testing), brown bag data may provide more complete information than pharmacy records. Age and health status of the participants as well as the type of medications of interest should be considered when determining the validity of medication information reported by participants.To obtain information about the health status and medical conditions of their study participants, researchers often collect participants' reports of current medications. The self-report method for medications is commonly referred to as the "brown bag" method, because participants are typically given a brown paper bag as the means for them to bring their current medications back to the testing site for testers to record the prescription and nonprescription items (e.g., Bosworth & Schaie, 1997;Jobe et al., 2001). However, self-reports of current medications have also been collected over the telephone (Landry et al.,

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“…However, when studying OTC drug use, not many options beyond self-reporting are available. While face-to-face studies can rely on the brown-bag method which is thought to increase comprehensiveness and accuracy of the reported use [36,37], this is not possible in the context of online surveys. Fourthly, survey research cannot be used to draw causal relationships [38].…”

Drug-related problems in diabetes and transplant patients: an observational study with home visits

“…The advantage of home visits is the possibility to get insight into the patient's management of his/her drug therapy at the place where it happens, and to detect DRPs which most probably would not be picked up by interviews in the pharmacy, even if the so called 'brown bag' method is used [33,34]. Therefore, we tried to identify those items of our interview guide that could only be picked up by home visits.…”

Agreement between self-reported data on medicine use and prescription records vary according to method of analysis and therapeutic group

“…Most studies are rather small and often conducted in specific populations such as participants in case-control studies or specific patient and age groups [9e11]. We have identified only two large, population-based studies comparing self-reported data on medicine use and pharmacy records [12,13].…”