We would like to define treatment patterns for GCA patients with tocilizumab or glucocorticoids. For glucocorticoids, we need dose and days of supply information in order to track dose changes (tapering) over time. The medication dose/days of supply information can be inconsistent from my previous experience with EMR and open claims? Can you share if OM1 has used a tapering algorithm in published studies?

Our research team has not used a tapering algorithm to look at dose over time.To calculate dose for oral medications at single points in time, the team uses quantity dispensed divided by days supply multiplied by strength. Note, the Steroid Dose calculated in the dataset is an average daily dose suitable for oral and injectable medications. It is appropriate to use for tapering where the Description ‘Taper’ is populated in MEDICATION_INGREDIENT table that is available in the in PremiOM Data User Guide.