Surveillance of gastrointestinal disease in France using drug sales data

AbstractDrug sales data have increasingly been used for disease surveillance during recent years. Our objective was to assess the value of drug sales data as an operational early detection tool for gastroenteritis epidemics at national and regional level in France. For the period 2008–2013, we compared temporal trends of drug sales for the treatment of gastroenteritis with trends of cases reported by a Sentinel Network of general practitioners. We benchmarked detection models to select the one with the best sensitivity, false alert proportion and timeliness, and developed a prospective framework to assess the operational performance of the system. Drug sales data allowed the detection of seasonal gastrointestinal epidemics occurring in winter with a distinction between prescribed and non-prescribed drugs. Sales of non-prescribed drugs allowed epidemic detection on average 2.25 weeks earlier than Sentinel data. These results confirm the value of drug sales data for real-time monitoring of gastroenteritis epidemic activity

Coping with demand volatility in retail pharmacies with the aid of big data exploration

Data management tools and analytics have provided managers with the opportunity to contemplate inventory performance as an ongoing activity by no longer examining only data agglomerated from ERP systems, but also, considering internet information derived from customers' online buying behaviour. The realisation of this complex relationship has increased interest in business intelligence through data and text mining of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, commonly referred to as "big data" to uncover underlying patterns which might explain customer behaviour and improve the response to demand volatility. This paper explores how sales structured data can be used in conjunction with non-structured customer data to improve inventory management either in terms of forecasting or treating some inventory as "top-selling" based on specific customer tendency to acquire more information through the internet. A medical condition is considered - namely pain - by examining 129 weeks of sales data regarding analgesics and information seeking data by customers through Google, online newspapers and YouTube. In order to facilitate our study we consider a VARX model with non-structured data as exogenous to obtain the best estimation and we perform tests against several univariate models in terms of best fit performance and forecasting

An evaluation of the contribution of pharmacy sales data for purposes of public health

The contribution of over-the-counter (OTC) medicines sales data from pharmacies for public health (PH) has previously attracted interest in the UK. In this study, data for several OTC medicines were utilised to explore their contribution to (a) understand the impact of medicine reclassification or increased regulation on supply and (b) the surveillance of infectious diseases in the community in Wales. Following the reclassification of ophthalmic chloramphenicol (June 2005) an increase in primary care supply (OTC + prescription) of 54% (47,026 units) in eye drops and 29% (15,657 units) in eye ointment were observed (2004 to 2010). Despite this increase the items of eye drops prescribed were similar 12 months before and five years after the reclassification. The impact of regulatory changes concerning the non-prescription sale of opioid-containing analgesics was studied. In the 12 months following September 2009 legislative changes there was a significant fall in sales of codeine- and dihydrocodeinecontaining solid oral dosage forms (p<0.05). Similarly, following the pack size restriction of non-prescription pseudoephedrine and ephedrine products (April 2008), significant (p<0.05) year-on-year reductions in the total weight of pseudoephedrine sold were observed. Sales of non-prescription ophthalmic chloramphenicol were monitored on a small area basis in two areas with known outbreaks of infective conjunctivitis. In both areas sales data did not demonstrate the required sensitivity. When monitoring seasonal influenza, significant positive correlations were observed between cough/cold/flu medicines sales and indicators of influenza activity in Wales. In alignment with the professional standards for PH practice for pharmacy produced by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, the work undertaken demonstrated a number of potential uses of medicines sales data for PH. Routine data collection, particularly if captured at time/point of sale, would further enhance its usefulness in detecting and tracking PH incidents