Pharmacy claims -> Drug exposure. How to identify the dispensing/billing pharmacy

[Gowtham_Rao]

@Christian_Reich

Well, we might have data sources where nothing is known about the source of a dispensation. So, we cannot make it required. Or, if we make it required, we have to put in the value 0. We are discussing this in THEMIS (no null values, 0 if we don’t know). But there is no difference.

Lets discuss this.

1. Pharmacy claim with no linked medical claim, pharmacy claim has dispensation date. Here we have two dates, visit_start_date and drug_exposure_start_date – both are drug dispensation dates. This is the most common scenario.
2. Pharmacy claim that is actually part of a medical claim. This is the scenario where a medical claim is filed for infusing chemotherapy at oncologist office. In this case, visit_start_date is generally equal to drug_exposure_start_date. Exceptions are if this is a multi-day visit, and the drug_exposure happens on subsequent dates.
3. Pharmacy claims without the date of dispensation – i dont think we can use this source data, because drug_exposure_start_date is a required field.