Glossary of Terms

Cohort

A group of patients that meet specific criteria.​

For example: “women over 50 years of age prescribed atorvastatin”

Dashboard

A selection of charts depicting output from analyses, sometimes descriptive statistics of the entire database

Cohort Builder

Group of functions that enable the selection of patient types for the purpose of defining a Cohort.

Brand Switching

The dynamics within a class of drugs where patients are switched between brands within the same product class. For example, in diabetes, switching from one brand of DPP-IV to a different brand.​

Line of Therapy

The dynamics within a market where patients will be changed from one type of drug to a different type of drug for the same condition. For example, in hypertension a doctor may decide to start the patient on an ACE-Inhibitor and later decides to switch the patient to a Calcium Channel Blocker – these constitute a change in Line of Therapy.​

Changing LOT may include the addition of a new class of drugs to existing therapy so that the patient is taking a combination of drugs from different classes.​

Patient Insights​

Group of functions that enable the selection of patient types for the purpose of defining a Cohort.

Payer

A listing of the insurance company or Government Agency responsible for reimbursement of medical transaction. Patients will normally have one payer at a time; however they may be eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid, and can also change payer over time.

ATC

ATC stands for Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical. This is an International Standard drug classification system where all drugs are classified by the anatomical system they work on.​

For a full explanation visit: https://www.who.int/tools/atc-ddd-toolkit/atc-classification ​

Run-in

Used in Line-of-Therapy; run-in period is a period prior to the first prescription that a patient must be able to have received a prescription from the target ATCs but did not. This ensures that the first prescription found is, in fact, the first prescription that patient received for any of the target ATCs.​

The longer run-in period used increases the likelihood that only first line therapies will be used in the analysis.  However, using a longer run-in period also reduces the number of patients included in the analysis. It may benefit the user to run the same ATC/cohort combination across different run-in periods to quantify the impact of the run-in period on the results.

Volatility Index

Used in Brand Switching and Line of Therapy; a measure of the extent to which a drug or an ATC is switched to/from. Calculated by adding all the gains and losses for the drug/ATC and dividing it into the final count.