Evaluating oseltamivir prescriptions in Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services medical claims records as an indicator of seasonal influenza in the United States

Abstract

BackgroundOver 34 million residents of the United States aged 65 years and older are also Medicare prescription drug beneficiaries. Medical claims records for this age group potentially provide a wealth of data for better understanding influenza epidemiology.ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to evaluate data on oseltamivir dispensing extracted from medical claims records as an indicator of influenza activity in the United States for the 2010‐11 through 2014‐15 influenza seasons.MethodsWe used Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) medical claims data to evaluate the weekly number of therapeutic oseltamivir prescriptions dispensed following a rapid influenza diagnostic test among beneficiaries 65 years old and older as an indicator of influenza timing and intensity. We compared the temporal changes in this indicator to changes in the proportion of influenza‐like illnesses among outpatient visits in the US Outpatient Influenza‐like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet) by administrative regions defined by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Using the moving epidemic method, we determined intensity thresholds and categorized the severity of seasons for both CMS and ILINet data.ResultsCenters for Medicare and Medicaid Services oseltamivir data and ILINet data were strongly correlated by administrative region (median Spearman's ρ = 0.78; interquartile range = 0.73‐0.80). CMS oseltamivir data and ILINet data substantially agreed (Cohen's weighted κ = 0.62) as to the seasonal severity across administrative regions.ConclusionsOur results support the use of oseltamivir dispensing in medical claims data as an indicator of US influenza activity.

Patterns of seasonal influenza activity in U.S. core-based statistical areas, described using prescriptions of oseltamivir in Medicare claims data

“…Third, our inclusion criterion for CBSAs biased our results towards higher severity, because we did not include CBSAs where the data were sparse. In a previous analysis, which was not limited to these 579 CBSAs, we classified national seasonal severity to the same or lower levels compared to our results here (Table 1) (Dahlgren et al, 2018). The developers of the MEM recommend that a minimum of 5 seasons of data be used with their method (Bangert et al, 2017).…”

“…Previously, we developed two measures of influenza activity using billing codes for the influenza antiviral oseltamivir in Medicare administrative data (Izurieta et al, 2015). In a recent paper, we compared influenza activity patterns with existing national influenza surveillance data (Dahlgren et al, 2018). We found strong correlations between our measures of influenza activity and national surveillance at a regional (multi-state) level.…”

Carboxylesterase 1 and Precision Pharmacotherapy: Pharmacogenetics and Nongenetic Regulators

“…Ethylphenidate can be formed via transesterification with ethanol. onset of symptoms to reduce flu duration by approximately 1 day), oseltamivir remains one of the most prescribed drug products because of flu epidemics (Singh et al, 2003;Dahlgren et al, 2018). As an esterprodrug, oseltamivir needs to be activated by CES1 into its active metabolite, oseltamivir carboxylate (Shi et al, 2006).…”

On the early detecting of the COVID-19 outbreak

“…For instance, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) considered the MEM as a standardized approach for the Influenza-Like Illness (ILI) reporting for the 2011/2012 influenza season in Spain [6]. Some recent researches have been using the MEM method in different health institutions to detect influenza outbreaks in different places such as Spain [6], Europe [4], United Kingdom [7,8], United States [9], Cambodia [10], Portugal [11], France [12] and Scotland [13].…”