"Take up to eight tablets per day": Incorporating free-text medication instructions into a transparent and reproducible process for preparing drug exposure data for pharmacoepidemiology.

ABSTRACT:

Purpose

Routinely collected prescription data provides drug exposure information for pharmacoepidemiology, informing start/stop dates and dosage. Prescribing information includes structured data and unstructured free-text instructions, which can include inherent variability, such as "one to two tablets up to four times a day". Preparing drug exposure data from raw prescriptions to a research ready dataset is rarely fully reported, yet assumptions have considerable implications for pharmacoepidemiology. This may have bigger consequences for "pro re nata" (PRN) drugs. Our aim was, using a worked example of opioids and fracture risk, to examine the impact of incorporating narrative prescribing instructions and subsequent drug preparation assumptions on adverse event rates.

Methods<

SUBMITTER: Jani M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10947089 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature