335 Trends in dermatological prescribing patterns during the COVID pandemic

This investigation aimed to assess the pandemic impact on the incidence of newly prescribed dermatological agents compared to the pre-pandemic period TrinetX is a real-time, federated healthcare database that was used in the retrospective review comprised of 61 million patient records at the time of the analysis This database was used to identify the incidence of newly prescribed drugs each month for two periods of the pandemic Medications were categorized by LOINC codes and categorized into groups The first period was from April-July 2020, and the second was from August-November 2020 The mean for each drug group was then compared with the pooled monthly incidence from similar periods between 2018-2019 before the pandemic Descriptive analyses were performed, and comparisons were made using a student's t-test 11 groups of dermatological agents were analyzed in both periods In the early pandemic period, 7 of 11 groups of agents showed a statistically significant reduction of up to 32 1% in prescription These agents included anti-psoriatic, anti-acne, topical anti-neoplastic, topical anti-viral, topical anti-inflammatory, topical anti-fungal, and all dermatological agents as a whole Newly prescribed topical analgesics, keratolytic, anti-perspirant, and anti-bacterial agents did not show a statistically significant decrease in prescription During the later pandemic, five of the dermatological agents showed a statistically significant decrease in prescription Anti-psoriatic, topical analgesics, topical antineoplastics, topical keratolytic, topical anti-perspirant, and topical anti-bacterial agents did not show a significant reduction This study shows that there has been a significant reduction in incidence of prescribed dermatological agents during the COVID19 pandemic Further research is needed to determine the future impact of this disruption in the dermatological care