Study Design and Tools
This study is a descriptive, retrospective claims analysis
conducted
using
the
Anticoagulant
Quality
Improve
-
ment Analyzer software, a condition-specific software
tool designed to evaluate population characteristics,
population health risks, and appropriateness of medication
use by allowing health plans to upload their pharmacy
and medical claims data via a simple point-andclick
method. A randomly selected 10% sample of
patients from the PharMetrics Integrated Database was
analyzed in this study by using this automated Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act–compliant
software
tool
to
produce
results
for
a
series
of
predetermined
and user-defined measures and to generate
actionable, patient/prescriber-level, overall sample-specific
reports.
A
10%
sample
of
this
database
was
deemed
sufficient
to provide an appropriate number of patients
to accurately represent treatment patterns within the
population of patients with AF; indeed, nearly 26,000
patients with AF who met the inclusion criteria for this
study were identified in this 10% sample.