An 80,000-patient trial that used an FDA network of data from national health plans found that mailed education information did not increase the use of oral anticoagulants (OACS) among patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) who were not being treated.

Pamela Tenaerts, executive director at the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative, says “the study is a successful proof of concept of embedding a randomized clinical trial into a claims system, while confirming in a large-scale experiment that the use of educational interventional approaches in medicine might be limited.”

Investigators from the trial relied on the FDA-Catalyst System and the Sentinel System.