Analysis of Prescription Drug Utilization with Beta Regression Models

Abstract

The health care sector in the United States is complex and is also a large sector that generates about 20% of the country’s gross domestic product. Health care analytics has been used by researchers and practitioners to better understand the industry. In this article, we examine and demonstrate the use of Beta regression models to study the utilization of brand name drugs in the United States to understand the variability of brand name drug utilization across different areas. The models are fitted to public datasets obtained from the Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Internal Revenue Service. Integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) is used to perform the inference. The numerical results show that Beta regression models can fit the brand name drug claim rates well and including spatial dependence improves the performance of the Beta regression models. Such models can be used to reflect the effect of prescription drug utilization when updating an insured’s health risk in a risk scoring model.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, which helped improve and clarify the article.

FUNDING

Guojun Gan and Emiliano Valdez acknowledge the financial support provided by the Committee on Knowledge Extension Research of the Society of Actuaries.

Discussions on this article can be submitted until January 1, 2023. The authors reserve the right to reply to any discussion. Please see the Instructions for Authors found online at http://www.tandfonline.com/uaaj for submission instructions.

Notes

1 https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NHE-Fact-Sheet (accessed on July 6, 2020).

2 The file name is PartD_Prescriber_PUF_NPI_16.txt and it is available from https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/Medicare-Provider-Charge-Data/PartD2016 (accessed January 20, 2020).

3 The file name is 16zpallagi.csv and it is available from https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-income-tax-statistics-2016-zip-code-data-soi (accessed January 12, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

Guojun Gan and Emiliano Valdez acknowledge the financial support provided by the Committee on Knowledge Extension Research of the Society of Actuaries.