#0055 Validation of self-reported medication use for hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia among employees of large-sized companies in Japan
Reliability of Self-reported Medicine Use Data in Health Management
In health management, the evaluation of medication use for common diseases like diabetes, dyslipidemia, and hypertension is important for designing health guidance and promotions plans in companies. It can be used to define the reliability of self-reported medicine use data as well. In Japan, only one study has reported the validation of self-reported medication in a group of local residents. But, so far, no such study has been conducted in a workplace.
To address this lack of research, we designed a large-scale study of self-reported medication use for hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia. We used data of one year—April 2016 to March 2017—from health insurance claims, considered the “gold standard” in identifying medication use. We compared these with self-reported data from 61,676 participants working in 13 pharmaceutical or manufacturing companies. The self-reported data was collected during health checkups using questionnaires and several validation measures. Additionally, to incorporate the variability in lengths of prescriptions of medication, we considered three periods for comparison: one month, three months, and one year.
We found high validity of the self-reports of medication use with the prescriptions of health insurance claims. Distinctively, the three-month period showed near-perfect agreement with the claims data. We also did not find any significant discordance in the validity data of hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia.
Despite the fact that medications for other common diseases should be examined and longer follow-up surveys and need to be conducted, these findings corroborate that the self-reported medication use data is reliable and can be used for assessing health insurance claims and designing policies in large-sized companies in Japan.
Link to the original journal article:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1348-9585.12138
Title of the paper:
Validation of self-reported medication use for hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia among employees of large-sized companies in Japan
Authors:
Kota Fukai, Tomohisa Nagata, Koji Mori, Makoto Ohtani, Kenji Fujimoto, Masako Nagata, Yoshihisa Fujino
