Database helps identify most effective drugs

Practice Patterns Science Inc., St. Louis, has developed PTE-Registry,™ a national comparative database designed to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies identify the drugs that produce more efficient treatment patterns with fewer side effects.

Educational tool

The database can also be used as a benchmarking tool to help educate health care providers on more effective practice patterns in treating medical conditions.

It can identify reductions in total medical treatment charges, reductions in complications and side effects and, for acute illnesses, reductions in treatment duration.

For health care plans, the database is a resource for comparing one plan's physician network with those of other health plans.

The database uses "diagnostic cluster methodology," a process in which medical and pharmacy claims data are linked to produce a "patient treatment episode." These patient treatment episodes link all charges incurred in treating a patient's medical condition within a specific period of time.

Practice Patterns Science will make a limited summary of the data available to the health care market with the publication of a three-volume set from the database.

The series is called the PPS/GreenBook™ and includes information about drug treatment for chronic diseases like asthma, diabetes, depression, seizure disorders and peptic ulcer disease.

In the future, Practice Patterns Science plans to expand the database to target Medicare-specific findings using Medicare risk-population data. PR