Consider patient 1B and the drug Actoplus Met. He received a 90 day supply on 17 June and another 90 day supply 22 days later on 7 July. Is it your intent that the first supply be used up in mid September and the second be used up by early October (basically double dosing for almost 2.5 months)? Or is your intent that the July supply was an early refill (patient was taking a long business trip or vacation) and the patient was single dosing for 180 continuous days?

If your intent is double dosing, then consider 15 July. Patient is taking four medications: 1 - the 17 May filling of GLYBURIDE-METFORMIN HCL 2 - the 17 June filling of ACTOPLUS MET 3 - the 17 June filling of JANUMET 4 - the 7 July filling of ACTOPLUS MET

The combination 1-2-3 appears to meet your selection criteria. Is the combination 1-3-4 a duplicate combination or a second combination that meets your criteria? Since 2 and 4 are separate fillings, is 1-2-4 or 2-3-4 a combination that meets your criteria?

-----Original Message----- From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Nancy Li Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 12:12 PM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Help for Coding problem

Hi dear SAS-Lers,

I have encountered a coding problem and would like to know whether anyone on the list could help me.

My goal is to find patients who are concurrently taking 3 or more medications(different drug names) over a 6 month time period in 2010. I need to look at the fill date along with the days supply to determine if there is any overlap between at least 3 different med scripts in a continuous 6 month period for a given patient. The following is the example data, any help would be highly appreciated!

Mem_id Fill_date Drug Name Days_supply 1B 15FEB2010 GLYBURIDE-METFORMIN HCL 90 1B 17MAY2010 GLYBURIDE-METFORMIN HCL 90 1B 17JUN2010 ACTOPLUS MET 90 1B 17JUN2010 JANUMET 90 1B 07JUL2010 ACTOPLUS MET 90 1B 02NOV2010 GLYBURIDE-METFORMIN HCL 90 2B 17JUN2010 JANUMET 90 2B 07JUL2010 ACTOPLUS MET 90 2B 02NOV2010 GLYBURIDE-METFORMIN HCL 90 3B 15FEB2010 GLYBURIDE-METFORMIN HCL 90 3B 17MAY2010 GLYBURIDE-METFORMIN HCL 90 3B 17JUN2010 ACTOPLUS MET 90

Thanks! Nancy