Featured Research
Pharmaceutical Research Computing (PRC)
Since 1998, Pharmaceutical Research Computing (PRC), a center within the School of Pharmacy’s Department of Pharmaceutical Health Services Research (PHSR), has been a rising star in the School. With increasing numbers of satisfied clients and completed studies, funded by federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality—or by private foundations, such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Commonwealth Foundation—PRC has established an excellent reputation for accuracy, reliability, and service.
“Our 2005 was very productive,” says PRC Director Van Doren Hsu, PharmD. “Last year we participated in 47 studies, a 17.5 percent increase over our 2004 totals.” Services offered by PRC include obtaining data and verifying its integrity, “cleaning” data, providing programming consultation, designing and creating databases, performing statistical analyses, and creating Web-based query systems for data from which clients may run their own reports based on variables they select.
PRC’s long list of current projects includes a study looking at the effect of a dialysis center on anemia management and mortality among hemodialysis patients; a benchmarking study that examines the expenditures on specialty pharmaceuticals among insurance plans; a study analyzing the effectiveness of a parent/child asthma communication intervention on asthma morbidity, cost of care, and improvement in asthma medication use in minority children with asthma (with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine); prescription drug abuse in adolescents and young adults; and looking for racial disparities in the management of cardiovascular risk in patients with diabetes and psychotic disorders (with the School of Medicine). Hsu touts PRC’s staff of programmers, who she says are instrumental in PRC’s success. “The majority of the studies we are involved with consist of large administrative data or secondary data,” explains Hsu. “Our programmers are experts in SAS (Statistical Analysis System), a powerful software program for data manipulation and statistical analysis—and essential to our handling of extremely large databases.”
To illustrate her point, Hsu cites a recent study for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, carried out in cooperation with the research company Westat, that required PRC to handle more than 140 gigabytes of data to analyze patterns of drug use among children in seven states who were Medicaid recipients.
Equally important in contributing to the success of PRC, says Hsu, is the pharmacists’ ability to create a bridge between researchers and programmers. “Our pharmacists are experts in translating drugs, procedures, and outcomes from researchers to algorithms that allow the programmers to find them in the study data,” Hsu points out. “Their pharmacy training also provides invaluable expertise in classifying drugs by name, dose, or route of administration.”
Most recently, PRC pharmacists have been working with researchers in the Peter Lamy Center on Drug Therapy and Aging to create a drug dictionary for the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS). The effort, says Hsu, allows researchers to more accurately examine drug utilization and expenditures by correcting data entry errors such as incorrectly spelled drug names or just plain typographical errors.
“If the drug name is wrong in the record, either the data will not be captured or captured incorrectly,” says Hsu. “The dictionary is essential in any research involving MCBS drug data.” Hsu notes that PRC also works closely with PHSR graduate students who hold accounts that allow them access to the PRC server and its data for use in class work. “PRC has established itself as an integral part of the PHSR department,” says Hsu. “With the support from researchers, I anticipate expansion of our services in the near future.”
From the Spring 2006 Capsule
—Randolph Fillmore