Rather than relying on self-reported utilization, records from insurance companies and other payers should be accessed.
First, cases were identified from service utilization records and were restricted to treatment seeking individuals who had a psychiatric or PTSD diagnosis, and it is likely that additional personnel had symptoms without an official clinical diagnosis.
We propose a method for defining and empirically validating episodes of alcoholism treatment from health care utilization records.
A subgroup of patients was selected from the larger study and their self-reports of utilization were compared to computerized utilization records.
Patient demographics, diagnoses, and utilization data from Fiscal Years (FYs) 2005 2007 were obtained from the VA Vital Status File, and medication adherence measures were constructed using pharmacy records from the FY2007 Decision Support System (DSS National Outpatient Pharmacy Extractss.
We illustrate these issues comparing public sector (administrative records from the US Department of Veterans Affairs system) and private sector (billing records from the US Medicare system) patient level data to identify primary-care utilization.
The unit costs assigned to the healthcare resource utilization recorded for each patient were obtained from a healthcare unit costs database [ 26].
The primary data source was the integrated EHR, which combines diagnosis, utilization, pharmacy, and laboratory records from across the care system.
Data regarding demographics, ocular/systemic medical histories, clinical variables, therapy initiations and reasons for changes, adverse events, and resource utilization were recorded from randomly chosen eligible charts.
Resource utilization data were obtained from patient interviews and recorded from the patient's medical chart.
