Assessing Chronic Disease Rates through Automated Pharmacy Data

It is well known that people with chronic conditions represent the bulk of all health care needs and associated costs. To set appropriate health care strategies, a crucial issue for policy makers and health care researchers worldwide is therefore to find proper methodologies to assess the number of individuals affected by specific chronic illnesses. Thus far, surveillance studies have been largely used to estimate the health status of a population because they are fairly inexpensive and data are easy to collect. Recently, the analyses of automated pharmacy data have been proposed as an effective means to measure chronic disease within investigated populations. Pharmacy data offer several advantages. Prescription data are easily accessible, inexpensive, precise, and well coded. In addition, drugs prescribed may be associated, to some extent, with specific chronic conditions. However, few studies have validated the accuracy of chronic diseases prevalence rates obtained by this methodology. The existence of a comprehensive, individual-level linkable pharmacy database of th