Micromedex red book

The vedolizumab IV cohort received induction therapy of 300 mg at weeks 0, 2, and 6. Those who responded to vedolizumab IV induction began maintenance therapy of 300 mg every 8 weeks. The adalimumab SC cohort received induction therapy of 160 mg on day 1 and 80 mg on day 15. Those who responded to adalimumab SC began maintenance therapy of 40 mg every 2 weeks. Patients could continue maintenance therapy for the remainder of the model. Treatments given after the initial therapy failed were dosed according to the approved label for each respective product. Wholesale acquisition costs (WACs) were collected from IBM Micromedex RED BOOK.¹⁹

Costs in the model solely comprise direct medical costs and were inclusive of drug costs, interventional administration costs (ie, intravitreal injection costs, office visit costs), and monitoring costs. Costs per anti-VEGF dose (ie, drug costs) were derived from IBM Micromedex RED BOOK using wholesale acquisition costs; costs of intravitreal injection and office visit costs were taken from the corresponding Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Physician Fee Schedule.^{32 ,33} Monitoring and disease-related costs included the cost of optical coherence tomography (OCT), the cost of fluorescein angiography, and a multiplier for bilateral fluorescein angiography (in the event that both eyes were tested). These values were derived from corresponding CPT codes and available published data.^{9 ,33} Additionally, all patients were assumed to have received an OCT at each treatment visit. A fluorescein angiography was assumed to have been performed only at the initial visit.¹²

We obtained data on albuterol prescription dispensing to Medicaid enrollees in all states between 2011 and 2018 from the State Drug Utilization Database, which is maintained by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services [22 ]. This database reports the quarterly number of prescriptions dispensed to Medicaid enrollees by national drug code (NDC). We identified products containing albuterol using a list of NDCs obtained from IBM Micromedex RED BOOK (see Table E1 in Online Supplement for full list) [23 ]. Our list included all albuterol NDC codes that were active during the study period.
In the State Drug Utilization Database, data are suppressed for any quarterly count less than 11. We imputed suppressed counts in the same manner as prior studies using the same dataset [24 ]. This method leveraged the discrepancy between the sum of state-level totals and the national total. Imputed counts were weighted inverse to the number of quarters during the year that the count was suppressed, so that counts less frequently suppressed received greater weight (see Methods E1 in Online Supplement for description of the full methodology). When suppressed cells were dropped instead of imputed, results from difference-in-differences analyses were unchanged (see Table E2 in Online Supplement, which contains the results without imputed counts).