DrugUtilisation: An R Package to Support Drug Utilisation Research Using the OMOP Common Data Model.
Guo Y., Burn E., Jödicke AM., Mercadé-Besora N., Lopez-Güell K., Chen X., Du M., Li X., Kolde R., Oja M., Mosseveld M., Verhamme K., Politi J., Delmestri A., Man WY., Rijnbeek P., Prieto-Alhambra D., Català M.
PURPOSE: To develop and describe DrugUtilisation, an open-source R package that facilitates drug utilisation studies using data mapped to the OMOP Common Data Model (CDM). METHODS: Core functionalities include creating drug user cohorts, identifying and summarising indications, describing the duration and dose of medication/s and assessing treatment adherence. The package works with packages developed within the DARWIN EU initiative to support study-specific workflows. We show the package's workflow by analysing the use of simvastatin in three European real-world databases. RESULTS: This paper outlines the DrugUtilisation package's functions and demonstrates their application with a clinical example of simvastatin use in databases from the United Kingdom, Estonia and the Netherlands. We generated results including cohort counts, indication summaries, measures of dose and duration, as well as publication-ready tables and figures. We implemented comprehensive unit tests and standardised output format, which ensured consistency across databases and minimised coding errors. CONCLUSION: The development of this software allows for researchers to quickly perform common drug utilisation analyses, while also providing the foundation for additional, bespoke study-specific analyses.