Some comments (repeating http://www.ohdsi.org/web/wiki/doku.php?id=research:treatment_pathways_in_depression):
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I would be interested in using data from our five nursing homes to
help with this study but the window of exposure is to long. Our dataset
is only 4 years total and so we would have almost no one who meets the
inclusion criteria. -
I have concerns about the definition of treatment pathway since many
of the antidepressant drugs have secondary indications (e.g., bupropion
and smoking cessation, trazodone for sleep). It might make sense to
distinguish in the analysis apparent treatment switches (e.g.,
sertraline to escitalopram) from treatment suplementation (e.g.,
sertraline for 6 weeks and then sertraline plus venlafaxine). -
The definition of the condition is interesting. Does the condition
need to appear more than once in the patient records during the
observation period? Not sure what level of granularity the analysis
would examine for treatment course.