polypharmacy-package {polypharmacy}

Calculate several polypharmacy indicators

Description

This package analyses prescription drug deliveries to calculate several indicators of polypharmacy corresponding to the various definitions found in the literature.

Details

It is essential to understand the underlying concepts used to calculate the various polypharmacy indicators to adequately use this package.
The core of the package is the data_process() function that creates a data.table of drug treatments by restructuring the drug delivery records (usually extracted from a pharmacy or a health insurance information system) into continuous periods of drug availability (called drug treatments) for every individual over the whole period of the study period. This process relies on several user-defined arguments such as the grace periods between renewals or the longest treatment duration that an individual may accumulate through successive early renewals.

Then, each polypharmacy indicator can be computed using the corresponding function (ind_simult(), ind_stdcumul(), ind_wcumul(), ind_stdcontinuous(), ind_ucontinuous()) or using the wrapper function indicators() to select the desired indicator(s) to be calculated at once.

Prior to running data_process() the user may need to pre-process the table of original drug delivery records to break down combination drug into their individual components (drugs_bkdn()) and/or to overwrite the delivery durations of some specified drugs with constant user-defined durations (cst_trt_dur()).

Author(s)

Maintainer: Guillaume Boucher [e-mail]

Authors:

• Bernard Candas [e-mail]

• Houssem Missaoui [e-mail]

Other contributors:

• Caroline Sirois [e-mail] [scientific advisor]

• Marc Simard [e-mail] [scientific advisor]

See Also

Useful links:

• Report bugs at https://github.com/guiboucher/polypharmacy/issues