HDR UK Applied Analytics Webinar: Linkage of Primary Care Prescribing Records & Pharmacy Dispensing Records - Holly Tibble (37:36)

Records of medication prescriptions can be used in conjunction with pharmacy dispensing records to investigate the incidence of adherence, which is defined as observing the treatment plans agreed between a patient and their clinician. Using prescribing records alone fails to identify primary non-adherence; medications not being collected from the dispensary. Using dispensing records alone means that cases of conditions that resolve and/or treatments that are discontinued will be unaccounted for. While using a linked prescribing and dispensing dataset to measure medication non-adherence is optimal, this linkage is not routinely conducted. Furthermore, without a unique common event identifier, linkage between these two datasets is not straightforward. We have developed a probabilistic record linkage methodology matching a large percentage of pharmacy dispensing records with primary care prescribing records for asthma medications. This will allow researchers to link datasets in order to extract information about asthma medication non-adherence. (Holly Tibble) 26/08/2021