R/utils-package.R

In polypharmacy: Calculate Several Polypharmacy Indicators

#' Calculate several polypharmacy indicators
#'
#' This package analyses prescription drug deliveries to calculate several indicators of polypharmacy corresponding to the various definitions found in the literature.
#'
#' It is essential to understand the underlying concepts used to calculate the various polypharmacy indicators to adequately use this package.\cr
#' The core of the package is the `data_process()` function that creates a `data.table` of drug treatments by restructuring the drug delivery records (usually extracted from a pharmacy or a health insurance information system) into continuous periods of drug availability (called drug treatments) for every individual over the whole period of the study period. This process relies on several user-defined arguments such as the grace periods between renewals or the longest treatment duration that an individual may accumulate through successive early renewals.\cr\cr
#' Then, each polypharmacy indicator can be computed using the corresponding function (`ind_simult()`, `ind_stdcumul()`, `ind_wcumul()`, `ind_stdcontinuous()`, `ind_ucontinuous()`) or using the wrapper function `indicators()` to select the desired indicator(s) to be calculated at once.\cr\cr
#' Prior to running `data_process()` the user may need to pre-process the table of original drug delivery records to break down combination drug into their individual components (`drugs_bkdn()`) and/or to overwrite the delivery durations of some specified drugs with constant user-defined durations (`cst_trt_dur()`).
#'
#' @docType package
"_PACKAGE"