polypharmacy

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

It is essential to know the 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 the data.table of pharmacists drug deliveries by restructuring the drug delivery records (usually extracted from a pharmacy or a health insurance information system) into continuous periods of drug availability, applying user-defined arguments such as the grace periods between renewals or the longest treatment duration that an individual may accumulate through the successive 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 overall function indicators() and select all 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 treatment duration of specified drugs with constant time periods (cst_trt_dur()).

Installation

install.packages("polypharmacy")

Development version

To get a bug fix or to use a feature from the development version, you can install the development version of polypharamcy from GitHub.

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("guiboucher/polypharmacy")

References