Patient-delivered therapy
Encyclopedia
Patient-delivered therapy (PDT or PDPT), also called expedited partner therapy (EPT), is the clinical practice of treating the sex partners of patients diagnosed with chlamydia or gonorrhea
by providing prescriptions or medications to the patient to take to his/her partner without the health care provider first examining the partner.
EPT may also include other forms of implementation than PDPT.
of 0.73, with a 95% confidence interval
of 0.57 to 0.93.
Pitfalls include that EPT may compromise the quality of care provided to partners, especially when used as a first-line approach for partners who would otherwise seek clinical services. For instance, the medication could cause serious adverse reactions, including allergy, which could have been foreseen by a visit to a health care provider.
Gonorrhea
Gonorrhea is a common sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. The usual symptoms in men are burning with urination and penile discharge. Women, on the other hand, are asymptomatic half the time or have vaginal discharge and pelvic pain...
by providing prescriptions or medications to the patient to take to his/her partner without the health care provider first examining the partner.
EPT may also include other forms of implementation than PDPT.
Efficacy
PDPT works as an addition to the usual patient referral, the latter being that the index patient has a responsibility for informing sex partners of their exposure to a sexually transmitted infection. PDPT significantly reduces the risk of persistent or recurrent infection compared with patient referral alone; a review found that addition of PDPT gives a relative riskRelative risk
In statistics and mathematical epidemiology, relative risk is the risk of an event relative to exposure. Relative risk is a ratio of the probability of the event occurring in the exposed group versus a non-exposed group....
of 0.73, with a 95% confidence interval
Confidence interval
In statistics, a confidence interval is a particular kind of interval estimate of a population parameter and is used to indicate the reliability of an estimate. It is an observed interval , in principle different from sample to sample, that frequently includes the parameter of interest, if the...
of 0.57 to 0.93.
Pitfalls include that EPT may compromise the quality of care provided to partners, especially when used as a first-line approach for partners who would otherwise seek clinical services. For instance, the medication could cause serious adverse reactions, including allergy, which could have been foreseen by a visit to a health care provider.