Cross-Sectional Study to Define and Validate "Doctor/Pharmacy Shopping" as Outcomes Suggestive of Abuse and/or Addiction

Member Companies of the Opioid PMR Consortium

Status: Completed

Conditions: Opiate Addiction; Opioid-Related Disorders; Drug Abuse; Narcotic Abuse

Treatments: Other: DB review for Doctor/Pharmacy Shopping Behavior

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other; Industry

Identifiers

NCT02668549

Observational Study 3033-8

3033-8 (Other Identifier)

Details and patient eligibility

About

The purpose of this study is to formulate definitions of doctor/pharmacy shopping and evaluate its association with abuse/addiction

Full description

Based on a review of the literature, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concluded that more data are needed regarding the serious risks of misuse, abuse, addiction, overdose, and death associated with the long-term use of extended release/long acting (ER/LA) opioid analgesics. Thus, the FDA is requiring that ER/LA opioid analgesic drug sponsors conduct post-marketing studies to assess these risks. The four observational post-marketing requirement (PMR) studies are labeled Study #2065-1, Study #2065-2, Study #2065-3, and Study #2065-4.

The objective of PMR Study #2065-4 is to define and validate "doctor/pharmacy shopping" as outcomes suggestive of misuse, abuse and/or addiction.

Study #2065-4 consists of three sub-studies, Study 4A, Study 4B, and Study 4C. In the current study (#2065 sub-study, Study 4A), the IMS® LRx database, a longitudinal pharmacy database that captures both third-party and self-pay transactions, will be linked to the PharMetrics Plus™ database, which contains provider, facility and pharmacy claims. From these databases, patients with shopping behavior will be identified and evaluated against an algorithm for abuse/addiction that will be developed and validated in PMR Study #2065-3B. Study #2065-3B will review the literature for health information suggestive of abuse/addiction in medical charts and medical claims. Then, through iterative processes that involve experts reviewing claims profiles and medical charts, text searches of medical records using natural language processing and supervised machine learning will identify and create a compilation of codes and health information with the best specificity and sensitivity to identify patients with opioid abuse/addiction. The compilation of codes and health information will be used to develop the algorithm that Study 4A will apply to define abuse/addiction. Restricting the validation of shopping behavior to only patients with diagnoses related to abuse would ignore the population with undiagnosed abuse. By supplementing ICD-9 codes with other information available on claims (e.g., addiction treatments, emergency visits) to define abuse/addiction, the measurement bias will be decreased and the estimates of the association of shopping behavior with abuse/addiction will be more valid. Categories of doctor shopping will be derived from the population distributions of the multiple variables analyzed for opioid users. The 4 categories will range from no shopping behavior (lowest level) to extensive shopping behavior (most extreme). The specifics of how the categories will be defined will be driven by the data.

Enrollment: 164,923 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

1. Age ≥ 18 years
2. Minimum of two dispensings for IR or ER/LA opioids or two or more diuretic dispensings

Exclusion criteria

N/A

Trial design

164,923 participants in 2 patient groups

Patients with Opioid dispensings

Description:

Patients receiving two or more opioid dispensings within 18 months

Treatment:

Other: DB review for Doctor/Pharmacy Shopping Behavior

Patients with Diuretic dispensings (neg control)

Description:

Patients receiving two or more Diuretics dispensings within 18 months will serve as negative control

Treatment:

Other: DB review for Doctor/Pharmacy Shopping Behavior