SCOTT BULL, PHARM.D., is a Pharmacy Research Analyst, Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, Oakland, CA At the time of the study, he was Pharmacoeconomics/Outcomcs Research Fellow, Novartis Pharmaceuticals/Kaiser Permanente. OMAR SHOHEIBER, PHARMD., is Vice PresidcntPmduct Development, Tricore Technologies, North Brunswick, NJ At the time of the study, he was Associate Director, Outcomes Rese...

Health care claims data are complicated animals. The eccentricities of this data include differences in the types of claims files and the services which populate those files, variations in the type of providers who service the population and the information needed about each type of provider, and finally, the actual populations of health care recipients and all of their individual specification...

In the linguistic domain, conceptual metaphors have been shown to structure grammar, the lexicon, and abstract reasoning. Much recent research on conceptual metaphor comes from corpus examination, which is increasingly focused on developing quantificational tools to reveal cooccurrence patterns indicative of source and target domain associations. Some mappings between source and target are tran...

Introduction Patients who suffer from rare diseases can be hard to diagnose for prolonged periods of time. In the process, they are often subjected to tentative treatments for ailments they do not have, risking an escalation of their actual condition and side effects from therapies they do not need. An early and accurate detection of these cases would enable follow-ups for precise diagnoses, mi...

WHAT IS KNOWN AND OBJECTIVE Pharmacy claims are commonly used to assess medication adherence. It is unclear how different approaches to handling hospitalizations compare to the gold standard of using outpatient and inpatient drug data. This study aimed to compare the impact of different approaches to handling hospitalizations on medication adherence estimation in administrative claims data. M...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW We sought to determine whether infertile men can accurately be identified within a large insurance claims database to validate its use for reproductive health research. RECENT FINDINGS Prior literature suggests that men coded for infertility are at higher risk for chronic disease though it was previously unclear if these diagnostic codes correlated with true infertility. We ...

BACKGROUND Claims-based algorithms based on administrative claims data are frequently used to identify an individual's primary care physician (PCP). The validity of these algorithms in the US Medicare population has not been assessed. OBJECTIVE To determine the agreement of the PCP identified by claims algorithms with the PCP of record in electronic health record data. DATA Electronic healt...

For universal health care systems such as that found in Australia, the health care budget constitutes one of the largest items for government expenditure. Identifying even small pockets of inefficiencies and wastage can have considerable impact (one percent of $30 billion is still a significant amount) and can result in shifting funds to where they are most needed. We report on the use of a dat...

BACKGROUND The population-based Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registries collect information on first-course treatment, including surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and hormone therapy. However, the SEER program does not release data on chemotherapy or hormone therapy due to uncertainties regarding data completeness. Activities are ongoing to investigate the opportun...