Effectiveness of medication review: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

BACKGROUND: Medication review is often recommended to optimize medication use. In clinical practice it is mostly operationalized as an intervention without co-interventions during a short term intervention period. However, most systematic reviews also included co-interventions and prolonged medication optimization interventions. Furthermore, most systematic reviews focused on specific patient groups (e.g. polypharmacy, elderly, hospitalized) and/or on specific outcome measures (e.g. hospital admissions and mortality). Therefore, the objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of medication review as an isolated short-term intervention, irrespective of the patient population and the outcome measures used. METHODS: A literature search was performed in MEDLINE, EMBASE and Web of Science from their inception through September 2015. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with medication review as isolated short term intervention (