Measuring Adherence With Claims Data For Schizophrenic Patients

Main Category: Schizophrenia
Also Included In: Psychology / Psychiatry;  Compliance
Article Date: 28 Apr 2009 - 5:00 PDT

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Medication non-adherence is commonly associated with adverse health conditions and increased economic burden to the health care system and is a critical issue especially in case of chronic therapies such as schizophrenia. Due to its usefulness in recent years, administrative claims data has been one of the most commonly used sources for calculating medication adherence. Medication adherence measured using pharmacy claims has been validated using other adherence measures such as patient reports, pill counts, questionnaires, and interviews. Despite these validation studies, there are no standards for the mathematical calculation of adherence using claims data.

Researchers lead by Sudeep Karve and Dr. Bradley Martin sought to provide researchers data to help identify the best adherence measure studying the variability explained between eight adherence measures and hospitalization episodes among Medicaid eligible persons diagnosed with schizophrenia on antipsychotic monotherapy.

Adherence rates were computed for 3,395 schizophrenic patients. The proportion of days covered (PDC) and continuous measure of medication gaps (CMG), the medication possession ratio (MPR), and continuous multiple interval measure of oversupply (CMOS) adherence measures were the best predictors of subsequent hospitalization and were considered the MPR and PDC were considered to be the preferred methods to calculate adherence.

This will be discussed in Value in Health, the official journal of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and outcomes Research.

Value in Health (ISSN 1098-3015) publishes papers, concepts, and ideas that advance the field of pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research and help health care leaders to make decisions that are solidly evidence-based. The journal is published bi-monthly and has a regular readership of over 4,000 clinicians, decision-makers, and researchers worldwide.

ISPOR is a nonprofit, international organization that strives to translate pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research into practice to ensure that society allocates scarce health care resources wisely, fairly, and efficiently.

Source
ISPOR