Identifying Predictors of Adverse Drug Reactions and Associated Costs using a Claims Database

摘要

Adverse drug reactions can cause negative patient outcomes, increase healthcare utilization, and contribute to rising healthcare costs. A senior advisor in clinical pharmacology at the National Institutes of Health pointed to several factors contributing to adverse drug reactions; among them was the lack of priority given to studying adverse drug reactions (Atkinson, 2002). Several studies have attempted to identify risk factors that may be used to predict which patients are most at risk of suffering an adverse drug reaction; however, most of this research has concentrated on adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients and among hospital admissions, or has been based on theoretical modeling. Little research has been done to determine if the risk factors identified in the literature are applicable to the much larger ambulatory population, nor has there been much work done in developing effective methods of identifying adverse drug reactions in an ambulatory population. Empirical testing in an ambulatory population of these literature-based risk factors needs to occur before intervention plans can be implemented to prevent adverse drug reactions in this population. The labor intensity and expense of medical record review, as well as privacy issue concerns, severely limit the use of this methodology for researching adverse drug reaction risk factors in the ambulatory population. Medical and pharmacy claims.